cover of episode The Identity of Hannibal

The Identity of Hannibal

2024/6/17
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48 Hours

AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript
People
A
Agent Jonathan Grusing
A
Amy Yakubo
B
Bob Markham
B
Brent Pace
D
Detective Gary Thatcher
F
FBI探员
J
Jim Davis
K
Katarina Booth
L
Lori McLeod
N
Narrator
一位专注于电动车和能源领域的播客主持人和内容创作者。
R
Rob McLeod
S
Scott Kimball
S
Stephen Holly
Topics
FBI探员:对连续杀人犯的定义是:一段时间内杀害三人或三人以上。 Howard Emory:他的女儿LeAnn Emory于2003年1月16日失踪,她的车在犹他州莫阿被发现。他积极寻找女儿,并发现女儿在失踪前曾与一个名叫Hannibal的人联系,Hannibal声称在保护她。 Bob Markham:他的女儿Jennifer Markham于2003年2月18日失踪,她的车在丹佛国际机场被发现。他怀疑Scott Kimball与女儿的失踪有关。 Rob和Lori McLeod:他们的女儿Casey McLeod于2003年8月23日失踪,最初被认为是离家出走,但后来怀疑另有隐情。他们怀疑Scott Kimball与女儿的失踪有关。 Tabitha Morton:Casey McLeod在高中时期叛逆,曾吸毒,这可能与她的失踪有关。 Brent Pace:LeAnn Emory的车被发现停放在偏僻的地方,现场有明显的迹象表明有人将LeAnn Emory带走。 Stephen Holly:他在信中暗示LeAnn Emory处于危险之中,并提到Hannibal是一个前囚犯,他曾将Hannibal介绍给LeAnn Emory。 Detective Gary Thatcher:他调查一起支票诈骗案时,第一次听说Scott Kimball的名字,并发现Scott Kimball是一名FBI线人,也是一名惯犯。 Agent Jonathan Grusing:他负责调查Scott Kimball的案件,并最终找到了Casey McCloud、LeAnn Emery的遗骸。他认为Scott Kimball杀害受害者的动机是贪婪、渴望关注和权力,以及可能存在的性动机。 Amy Yakubo:Scott Kimball与所有失踪案都有关联。 Katarina Booth:检察官希望将Scott Kimball定罪为谋杀罪,并与他达成协议,以换取他提供失踪者的遗骸地点。 Jim Davis:Jim Davis解释说FBI无法24小时监控所有线人。 Scott Kimball:Scott Kimball承认杀害了他的叔叔,但对其他三名女性的死只字不提,并声称自己不是连续杀人犯。

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So, kill one person, you wait a while, cooling off period, you kill another one, you wait a while, and you kill another one. LeAnn Emory is the daughter of Howard and Darlene Emory. She left home on January 16th, 2003, and told her parents she was going to Mexico with friends to go caving. A few days after she left my place, her car was found abandoned in Moab, Utah, and I haven't seen her since.

Jennifer Markham is the daughter of Bob Markham and Mary Willis. Her car was found parked at the Denver International Airport on February 18, 2003. If she didn't call me in a few months, then I would call her back. And I'd always say, Jennifer, give me a call. Wanted to make sure you're OK. Nothing's happened to you. Casey McLeod is the daughter of Rob and Lori McLeod. She was 19 years old at the time that she disappeared.

She was offered a ride to work. She never returned. And that was the night of August 23, 2003. At first, we thought she was a runaway. It's a story that made sense, but slowly over time, we became convinced that that wasn't the truth. I know Casey was set up. I feel I let her down. Terry Kimball was a recent divorcee who came to the Denver area seeking work on a ranch. Around the 1st of August 2004, he disappeared.

Was there any point, Agent Grusing, that you realized that these cases, all four of them, were somehow connected? Yes. We know about four victims. We don't know if there are other victims, but serial killers don't just kill four people and be done with it. The person that was causing this trouble, his name was Hannibal. It's chilling. It's Silence of the Lambs.

Was he in your town in 2003? Was he in your town in 2004? Or was he in your town in 1999? He's very, very manipulative. He draws people into him. He makes you believe great things will happen for you, and you end up dead. Harold Dow reports Hannibal Unmasked.

That's for some reason one of my all-time favorite pictures ever, because it looks like she's just sitting there, visiting with you. Not posed, not formal, just hanging out. This is Rob McCloud's daily ritual. You say you visit this website every day. Why do you do it? Just to see her, just for a sec. And then there's been real emotional days that I can't possibly...

look at her pictures. Rob's daughter, 19-year-old Casey McCloud, vanished in August 2003. Tell us about her personality. Bright and bubbly and fun. She was a very happy, easy to get along with, wanting to please type of kid. She danced and sang all the time, all around the house all the time.

Casey was Rob and Lori McLeod's only child. Hey, Rob and Lori. When she was a toddler, they doted on her. Casey was brought up in bubble wrap.

We protected her from everything. But Casey's sheltered life didn't last long. Rob and Lori divorced when she was four, and as she got older, Casey grew rebellious. She was butting heads with her mom and started smoking and started engaging in behavior in high school that her mom didn't approve of, and packed her up and moved her down to her aunt's in Arizona. Phoenix was Casey's new home, and that's where she met best friend Tabitha Morton.

We were both turning 16, I believe, when I met her. We were so close, literally, that we were practically attached at the hip. Because we worked together, we were going to school together, and we spent so much of our personal time together. But after high school, Tabitha says Casey fell in with the wrong crowd. There was a girl that decided to move in with her.

This girl was heavy into drugs and she was bringing lots of people, you know, who were using drugs to the house quite often. Casey kind of fell into that. When I noticed that something was wrong, I called her aunt and I said, "I think that Casey's in some trouble." So she was sent back to Colorado in late 2001. It didn't change our friendship. I think it actually made it stronger because she knew I was really looking out for her.

She had a few months of drug use, but that's not who she was. As Casey settled back into her old surroundings, a new man entered her mother's life, Scott Kimball. He was great. And he was very charming and funny and smart. Now living with Scott and Lori, Casey seemed to be getting herself back on track with new friends and a new job.

But then came a shocking disappointment. Scott found drugs in the house. And when I confronted Casey, she swore to me that they weren't hers. She begged me to get a drug test, and I didn't believe her. When Lori threatened to turn her in to the cops, Casey took off down the road on her bicycle. What did you think happened to Casey? I thought she took off because I didn't believe her.

I worried sick about her. I drove around looking for her. At first, Rob was angry. Casey had run away before. I was worried about her, but not to the point of that I thought any foul play happened. I figured she was over, found a friend, and was crashing over at their place. She'd call or eventually just show up like she had before.

But two days later, when Casey failed to show up for her shift at a sandwich shop, Lori became frantic. I went to the police and they told me that it was not my right to find her. Casey was over 18. She was not a runaway. She simply left. You didn't file a missing persons report? The police won't allow that. There had to be blood evidence of foul play in order to file a missing persons report.

But at least Lori had the support of Scott Kimball, who had important law enforcement contacts. He worked for the FBI. He helped catch bad guys. So when she disappeared, did you talk to Scott? Yes. What did Scott say? With his connections with the FBI, we'll find her. Desperate, Lori even married Scott, seeing him as the only hope to finding her daughter.

And sure enough, he turned up a few leads, including evidence that Casey had stopped by the house very recently when no one was home. He found Casey's necklace on her doorknob. Even more promising, Scott found a neighbor who said he had seen Casey weeks after she disappeared. The neighbor said that Casey had been at the house with her boyfriend and his sister.

Back in Phoenix, Tabitha Morton was also looking frantically for her friend. I called everybody that we knew. I set up a MySpace page for her, contacted people from high school, passed out flyers. Weeks, then months went by. The most unbearable thing for me to think of my daughter is that someone took her, something precious, something important to me, and destroyed it and threw it away like it wasn't important to anybody.

Together, Rob and Tabitha began to wonder if the key to Casey's disappearance might be much closer to home. It was just this nagging feeling that kept going through my head that there was something more than what we were finding. You can host the best backyard barbecue when you find a professional on Angie to make your backyard the best around.

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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. Over the course of time, you're wondering, where is she? You know, is she hurt? Is she hungry? These thoughts tormented Rob McLeod from the time his daughter Casey vanished in August 2003.

But what Rob didn't know was that another Colorado father was asking those very same questions. You wonder, where is she? Has she been kidnapped? You wonder what in the world has happened to her. Seven months before Casey McCloud disappeared, Howard Emery's 24-year-old daughter Leanne had also mysteriously vanished.

So Howard, tell me about this picture of Leanne. She was about 14 years old. As you can see, she also loved the outdoors. We were always exploring the Rocky Mountains. Howard Imrie has spent countless hours replaying Leanne's life, a life that began full of promise. She was a straight-A student in high school and actually graduated a year early.

But Leanne's life soon spiraled downwards. Her mother's severe health problems kept Leanne from finishing college. She lost her job as a veterinarian's assistant and she landed in an abusive marriage. I think it was almost kind of the turning point. I think she had a real feeling that she really wasn't worth much, that she couldn't do much. In 2002, Leanne left her husband, but her father was still concerned because she began a relationship with a prisoner named Stephen Holly.

On January 16, 2003, Leanne's car with its unique license plate pulled out of the driveway. The dog she loved the most was Dalmatians. On her car, she had a license plate that said "Dalgal." Leanne said she was heading for a caving trip in Mexico with friends. But two weeks later, Howard got a call that still haunts him. It was the sheriff's department in Moab, Utah.

And they says, "Well, I hate to tell you, but we found her car abandoned in the Canyonlands in Moab, Utah just yesterday." They told me about the license plate and I knew immediately this is Leanne's car. All her clothes, stuff like that.

was left in the car. Brent Pace, a seasoned Utah investigator and tracker, could tell someone had picked Leanne up. The car was actually pulled straight into here, just like this. Like, he just drove in off that road and parked it right here. Then the driver got out and walked back and got in another vehicle. One set of shoe prints leaving this car to another set of tire tracks.

And because of that, you know, we were kind of concerned, you know, maybe something did happen out here. Like the McClouds, Howard tried to file a missing persons report back in Colorado, but was shut down. So he decided to play detective himself. So I wanted to know why she was gone. There's obviously a million questions here.

Using credit card records, Howard pieced together Leanne's trail in the weeks before she disappeared. She didn't go to Mexico. He discovered Leanne was leading a secret life. She spent the 10 days before she vanished traveling through the western United States, writing bad checks and charging thousands of dollars to her father's credit card.

I was totally bewildered. She was either threatened or blackmailed. She would not have done this on her own. And it seemed Howard was right. He came across several emails Leanne had sent a cousin just days before she left. Emails that hinted she was in trouble, but was being protected by someone with a curious nickname.

She says, "And as for Hannibal, I think I can trust him. He's actually protecting me." My thought was protecting her from what? A few clues arrived in several cryptic letters from Leanne's prison boyfriend, Stephen Holly. Basically, he told me that she was in terrible danger and please call the FBI immediately.

Alarmed, Howard went to visit Holly, who told him that Hannibal was a former inmate he had put in touch with Leanne. I says, "Tell me about Hannibal. Do you think he would hurt my daughter?" He says, "Well, I really don't think Hannibal would hurt Leanne, but Hannibal does know some people that wouldn't hesitate to kill Leanne if he asked them to do it." But Holly refused to reveal Hannibal's true identity.

And when Howard brought Holly's story to the FBI, the agent he spoke to dismissed it as pure fiction. There's a possible kidnapping here and yet he showed no interest whatsoever. As time passed, everyone was left with more questions than when they began. Even Brent Pace, who kept up the search.

It's hard to be involved in a case and not know the whys, why this happened. It's hard to forget these kind of cases. I mean, it's somebody's child, a human being, you know, and so those are questions you really want answered. But no one realized Hannibal was actually working for the FBI and married to Lori McLeod. Hannibal's real name? Scott Kimball. No matter what belief is, you know,

Lori McLeod began having suspicions about Scott Kimball after they were married in August 2003, the same month her daughter Casey went missing. Off and on, he would say things that didn't feel right. And again, when I would question him, he would make me feel I was losing my mind. And to be perfectly honest, I wanted to feel that what I was thinking wasn't right.

But it wasn't until two years later that Lori shared some disturbing information with her ex-husband, Rob McLeod. I'm talking to Lori. She goes, "Well, that whole weekend Casey went missing is not quite what I told you. There's a little bit more to it than that." What did she say? She said Scott took off the same weekend Casey did on a solo, mystery, I don't know where he went camping trip.

Lori and Rob weren't the only ones asking questions. In early 2006, Kimball became a suspect in a case that Lafayette, Colorado detective Gary Thatcher was investigating. When did you first hear of the name Scott Kimball? It was when I had an officer come to me with this check fraud case. That was the first time I heard about him. Thatcher learned that Kimball's job with the FBI was as a paid criminal informant.

He was also a con artist who had spent most of his life racking up felony convictions and prison time all over the Western United States.

But when Thatcher went to find Kimball, he was gone. Well, it was January 2006. Initially, I was talking to Lori about where is Scott Kimball, and then she dropped that on me as that Casey's missing, and she's suspicious of Scott. That was the eye-opener that, you know, the check fraud is important here, but there's a much bigger picture to this investigation.

A warrant was put out for Kimball's arrest. Two months later, US Marshals tracked him down and after a dramatic high-speed chase through California's Coachella Valley, arrested the con man. Now with Kimball safely in custody, Detective Thatcher made a vow to Rob McCloud. He says, Rob, where there's smoke, there's fire. He says, I will not forget Casey. I will not rest until we figure out what happened to her.

As Thatcher dug deeper, he learned from the FBI that Kimball was connected years earlier to yet another missing Colorado woman, Jennifer Markham. Now it was just one more thing added onto the pile of suspicion. Jennifer was a struggling single mother who worked as a stripper. On February 17, 2003, she visited her boyfriend, drug dealer Steve Ennis, in prison.

Shortly after that visit, she vanished. There's total anxiety. Begin to wonder, where is she? Her father, Bob Markham, like the other fathers, was stumped. All you can do is hope that maybe she'd been arrested, somehow put in jail, that that's where she's at. How long did you go through that?

For a year. Then one day, Bob's phone rang. It was an FBI agent named Carl Sloth. And they asked if Jennifer's there. And I said no. At that point, Ethan said that something bad may have happened to her. Agent Sloth revealed that Jennifer's car had been found abandoned at the Denver airport. It was after a while that we found out that they had found it a year before. And nobody had contacted us. Doesn't that seem odd? I couldn't believe it.

Markham kept pressing Schlaf for answers, so the agent set up a meeting with his informant, who had once shared a prison cell with Jennifer's boyfriend. That informant was Scott Kimball. He told me he knew where she was, how she died, how it happened, everything.

Jennifer's mother, Mary Willis, came with Bob to this park to meet Scott Kimball. He told them that Jennifer had been killed by some of her boyfriend's drug associates. Kimball said he had even seen pictures of her dead. He told me she was strangled. She was tied up and she was strangled from behind. And she put up a fight. As he was telling you this, what were you thinking of him? I was thinking, how could he know this?

Then Kimball made Jennifer's parents a chilling offer. When we were done with the conversation, getting ready to leave, then he came up and said, "If you stay until tomorrow, I'll go up in the mountains with you and take you up in the mountains to show you where she's at." You didn't go with him, neither did your ex-wife? No, when we got-- Why not? When we got done talking at the picnic table and stuff, I'd already decided that Scott Kimball had killed my daughter. I thought that if we went in the mountains with him,

the next day or then, that they'd never see us again. When Jennifer's parents brought their suspicions to Agent Slough, he dismissed them and defended his informant. He trusted Scott Kimball, never should have trusted Scott Kimball. I always had the impression that the FBI had us meet Scott to make it so we would feel badly about what Jennifer was doing and how she'd been living in her life.

And I didn't care because I loved Jennifer. And no matter what she did, we want her back. I think they really thought that by doing this, we would become one of the families that would just turn around and get on the airplane and go back home, and Jennifer would just disappear.

So Bob Markham took matters into his own hands and put up a billboard next to the strip club where Jennifer had once danced. We wanted to try and find out if someone would come forward with some information about her. It worked. And in June of '06, this would have been a couple months after Scott was apprehended, I'm reading in the newspaper about Bob Markham putting up a billboard for

for his missing daughter, for Jennifer Markham. And as I'm reading the story, I come across Scott Kimball's name in the story. He is the last one Jennifer was spending time with. My heart about leapt out of my chest. When Rob called, he said, "We have something in common." He said, "My daughter disappeared and my ex-wife is married to Scott Kimball."

Hungry for more information, Bob went to see Lori McLeod. And then I asked Lori, "Is there anyone else that you could think of that she's been around you, you and Scott, that you haven't ever seen again?" And it was just like a light bulb went off in her head. She sat back in the chair and then she goes, "Oh my God." She says, "Uncle Terry came and lived with us for a couple weeks."

And then he left, and we've never seen him again. Scott Kimball's uncle, Terry Kimball, had vanished from their home in 2004. I immediately knew that I finally had something to go to the FBI with.

So together, Bob Markham and Rob McCloud, two fathers with missing daughters, marched into the FBI's Denver office and revealed their suspicions about Scott Kimball to the new supervisor. The final thing we told them is, "You guys have a choice. You could be the hero or the zero. Either look into it or you can be the zero and you can ignore it." I think they took it as, "Wow, maybe there is something here. We better look into it."

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In the fall of 2006, just weeks after Bob Markham and Rob McCloud met with the FBI, Special Agent Jonathan Grusing was assigned to investigate Scott Kimball. If you had to pick one thing that drives Scott Kimball, what is it? Greed, most likely. And not only greed for money, but he craves attention and he craves power as well.

Joining Agent Grusing on the case was Detective Gary Thatcher, already a year into his own investigation of Kimball. Together, they embarked on the most complex cat and mouse game of their careers as they began to interview Kimball, who was still in jail pending fraud charges. You know, he's very good with coming up with stories, and so when you're sitting there listening to him, you're thinking, "How do I prove this? How do I disprove it? How do I, you know, substantiate this with facts?"

One of Kimball's stories was that his uncle Terry, now missing for two years, had won the Ohio lottery and moved to Mexico with a stripper. The Ohio State lottery never paid out to Terry Kimball. He was never a winner. The investigators suspected Terry was murdered when Kimball discovered he had come into some money from a divorce. Terry was carrying around thousands and thousands of dollars in a briefcase he wouldn't let go of.

For me, that's enough motive for him to kill Terry. Next, Grusing and Thatcher focused on Jennifer Markham. She had first come to Kimball's attention when he shared a cell with her boyfriend, Steve Ennis, back in 2002. And Scott Kimball saw pictures of Jennifer up on the wall. She was a very attractive woman, and he made such comments to Steve that he could find her a good job when he got out of prison. What was his real motive?

His real motive was to have Jennifer for himself. The con man also wanted to get out of prison, and he had a plan. Kimball convinced the FBI that Jennifer Markham was part of a murder-for-hire plot. No information that I have says that she even knew about this plot that Scott was spinning when he was there in prison. But the FBI bought Kimball's story at the time.

And when he was released in December 2002, he went to work as an informant in the phony case. Two months later, Jennifer vanished. But while Grussing was trying to figure out what actually happened to Jennifer, he got an unexpected lead.

So I interviewed Steve Ennis about Jennifer's disappearance and at the end of the interview when we were about to wrap up he said, "Oh, and one other thing. There was another guy down here in the prison that had a girlfriend disappear that Scott might have had something to do with." That inmate was Stephen Holley, LeAnn Emery's boyfriend.

I spoke with Mr. Emory and said, I'm doing an investigation. I'm trying to speak with Leanne Emory. And he said, we haven't seen Leanne since 2003. And when you heard those words, what thoughts went through your mind? It did send a chill down my spine because I knew then that this was going to be another victim of Scott Kimball. Investigators felt they could prove that when they found Leanne's picture, her hair dyed brown, on Kimball's laptop.

Boulder County Prosecutor Amy Yakubo. Oh my God, the last person that Casey was known to be with was Scott Kimball. Oh my God, the last person that Jennifer Markham was known to be with was Scott Kimball. Oh my God, LeAnn Emery was the last person that Scott Kimball was with. And so bit by bit, piece by piece, it became apparent just how dangerous he was.

But there were still no bodies and the con man was admitting to nothing. Investigators kept pushing and finally in April 2008, Kimball dropped a hint. He said in this meeting that there was a girl who died of a drug overdose that was on national forest land. Grusing had a receipt showing Kimball was in Walden, Colorado near a national forest that same weekend Casey McCloud went missing.

He called the Forest Service. - I asked if they had any missing people up there. I ended up speaking with basically the phone receptionist and she said, "No, but a skull was found up here last winter. So maybe you can check on that." - A hunter had stumbled across the skull. Gruesing ordered a DNA test on the remains and they proved to be Casey McCloud's.

Finally, the Scott Kimball case was an official homicide investigation. And he went to great lengths to conceal these bodies. And I believe he thought no one would ever find them. After four long years, Rob McCloud finally had an answer to his prayers. One way or another, she's coming home. She's not lost anymore. And Laurie McCloud's worst nightmares were realized. What do you think really happened?

I believe Scott planted the drugs to set everything up. That was to get her out of the house? Yes. So he can get her? To separate us, yes. You find out that the man that you married, the man who said he was going to be there to help you find Casey, you now find out that he may have been the one who killed her. Yes. It's impossible to describe knowing that you've married your daughter's murderer.

But with no evidence of how Casey died and with no other bodies, prosecutors worried they still did not have enough to put Kimball on trial for murder. Meeting after meeting after meeting and briefing and continual, "Here's all the evidence that we have. Do you think we have enough yet?"

In December 2008, prosecutors got one step closer to putting Kimball away for good when he was sentenced to 48 years on his recent nonviolent crimes. But lead prosecutor Katarina Booth wanted more. What we wanted him marked for, of course, is the violent, you know, murderer that he is.

So prosecutors made a difficult decision. They offered Kimball a deal. No charges of first-degree murder if he would lead them to the three missing bodies. Kimball accepted. And in the winter of 2009, he led authorities to the remote canyons of eastern Utah, where he claimed they would find the remains of Leanne Emery and Jennifer Markham.

Every day he was full of energy and he gave us to-do lists. Did you do this? Did you get satellite imagery? Did you get a plane to fly me over? Kimball spent days leading the FBI and the Grand County Sheriff's Department on a fruitless search for Leanne. But then Agent Grusing spotted something. This is it right in here. Right in here? Yeah. What exactly did you see down there? Some bones where the big boulder is.

And then there was a rock to the left, lifted up the rock, and it was a hair clip with hair. By that time, it was her. LeAnn Emery had lain on this lonely canyon ledge for six years. She had a high potential, and she just took the wrong for it, got involved with the wrong people, and she didn't deserve this.

found near her bones was a spent bullet, it matched Scott Kimball's gun. We believe that Scott marched her up here and executed her. Why do you suppose Scott Kimball murdered Leanne? Leanne had been dragged into laundering money for Scott, so I believe that Leanne had served her purpose and that he was done with her, and that's why he took her up here and killed her. Now, only one missing woman remained.

But is this suspected serial killer finally ready to reveal what happened to Jennifer Markham? Do you know where her remains are? You know, I believe I do. Have you ever covered a carpet stain with a rug? Ignored a leaky faucet? Pretended your half-painted living room is supposed to look like that? Well, you're not alone. We've all got unfinished home projects.

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We get support from Dove. Hey y'all, it's your girl Kiki Palmer, host of the Wondery Podcast. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. Let me cut to the chase. Did you know that in many states across the U.S., it's still not illegal to discriminate against people based on the way their hair grows out of their head? To deny black folks from jobs and opportunities because they have braids, locks, twists, or bantu knots? That's messed

And today's sponsor, Dove, agrees. That's why Dove co-founded the Crown Coalition in 2019 to advocate for the passage of the Crown Act. Crown stands for creating a respectful and open world for natural hair. And the Crown Act is legislation which prohibits race-based hair discrimination in workplaces and schools in the U.S.

Dove is driving awareness by advocating for petition signatures and supporting the Crown movement to create a society where black hair is not only accepted, but respected and celebrated in all of its beauty. Join Dove in taking action to help end race-based hair discrimination by signing the Crown Act petition at dove.com/crown. That's dove.com/crown. - I think Scott enjoys manipulating people. He's very good at twisting the truth.

After taking investigators to the body of Leanne Emery, Scott Kimble told them where to find the remains of his Uncle Terry. But his leads about Jennifer Markham's body in Utah turned up empty. We not only searched it with Scott here, we came back and searched it with Grand County, with K-9 units.

We searched it with a geologist, we've flown over it with airplanes, and nothing's here. Do you know exactly where she is? No, I believe I know the area. The area, you have to realize, I was at the location one time, it was dark.

I was there once. Scott Kimball insists he's trying to help find Jennifer, but is it just another con? I've made every effort to help them with Jennifer. I've told them I'd take a polygraph to make sure that I'm being truthful in the direction that I've given them, what I remember. He's very methodical. He's very careful where he puts his victims. And I give it basically zero probability that he has forgotten where Jennifer Markham is.

Nevertheless, in October 2009, the families of Scott Kimball's victims gather in court. It was nice to be able to be there to look him in the eye and watch him take some accountability. The con man had been charged with second-degree murder. Scott Lee Kimball caused the death of Terry Kimball and Scott Lee Kimball caused the death of Jennifer Markham, Leanne Emery, and Kacen Cloud. How do you call a guilty or not guilty? Guilty.

And with that word "guilty," a monumental six-year case finally comes to an end. You never gave up for those families because you can only imagine the torture they went through and their distress and sadness. And now Bob Markham and Rob McLeod, the two fathers whose determination forced the FBI to investigate what happened to their daughters, address the court. Casey Dawn McLeod was my firstborn daughter.

I was present right there the very first moment she took her first breath. Scott Kimball was there to take her last. Scott Kimball has destroyed our lives. Our lives will never be the same. How many other people are missing as a result of his life? Mr. Emery. And Howard Emery finally confronts Hannibal. My daughter was a young woman with feelings and dreams.

And to treat her like trash is despicable. He is a liar, a deceiver, a murderer. For the deaths of four people, Scott Kimball is sentenced to 70 years. But he insists he's not a serial killer. I'm just a guy. People call me cold-blooded, cold-hearted, but you'll find dozens of people that will say just the opposite. They'll give you the shirt off his back.

he freely admits only to the murder of his own uncle and speaks in riddles about the three young women. I did kill Terry Kimball. I did. And for the other three, I was a mechanism

- I was part of the mechanics. - Okay. - Mechanism could be many things. - Mechanism could be the person pulling the trigger. - It could be. It could be the person that arranged for the hit or the death or whatever you want to call it. There's a lot it could be. - If there were other people involved who committed the murders, you're not gonna reveal who it was? - Never will I reveal who it was. I'm not the FBI, I'm not the police. - Investigators say Kimball won't name accomplices for a very good reason. They don't exist.

I think the murders of these women are very private to him. I believe there was some sort of sexual attraction for him as well that he doesn't like to talk about. I believe that's why he's able to take responsibility for Uncle Terry's death, because it was purely for financial gain. But there was something else involved with Scott and these three girls. Whatever darkness fuels Scott Kimball's murderous rampage, the victim's families are grateful the FBI finally helped unmask the killer.

Did anyone from the FBI ever apologize to you? Repeatedly. They said, "We're sorry this has all happened. He hoodwinked us. He's fooled everybody." Yet they remain angry at the system and Agent Carl Sloth, whose negligence, they say, gave Kimball the freedom to commit the murders. If someone were watching Scott, Casey would still be here today. Jennifer was the person he was let out of prison to monitor, and she went missing almost immediately.

Jim Davis of the FBI's Denver office says the FBI cannot constantly monitor criminal informants. We can't control them 24 hours a day. We just, we don't have the resources to do that. And really, we don't have the authority to do it. You know, this case is a tragedy. I mean, it's a tragedy for the victims. It's a tragedy for the victims' families. But to be clear, you know, the individual responsible for that is Scott Kimball.

And it's not the FBI. It's not anybody else. It is him. He did it. And I know we use the phrase dealing with the devil. I guess you were dealing with the devil in this case. He is as close as I've seen. What remains are shattered lives. But at least two lost daughters have finally come home. As long as I'm alive, her memory is always going to be there. And I have to reconcile the fact that I won't ever see her again.

Casey's loss is like the background noise of my life. I can find joy and happiness and feel normal a lot of the time. But when it's quiet, she's that background noise that's always there. However, the search for Jennifer Markham continues. As her father waits for news that may never come, he takes solace in the fact that it was his perseverance that helped put his daughter's killer away.

the possibility today exists that you may never know where she's buried. That's true. I really would like to have my daughter's body packed, but knowing that Scott Kimball is in prison and that he's not going to be getting out of prison for at least 35 years means more to me than you can imagine. And to me, my daughter's soul is in heaven and wherever her body is, it'll be joined back with her soul someday.

In 2017, Scott Kimball was charged with solicitation of murder and attempted to escape from prison. In 2020, four years were added to his previous 70-year prison sentence. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at wondery.com slash survey.

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