Scott Lee Kimball

What the record shows

Scott Lee Kimball is a Colorado con man and former paid FBI informant who pleaded guilty in Boulder County District Court on October 8, 2009, to killing four people in 2003 and 2004: LeAnn Emry, Jennifer Marcum, Kaysi McLeod and his uncle, Terry Kimball. Under a plea agreement he was sentenced the same day to 70 years in prison; the Associated Press reported that the pleas were to second-degree murder. Two of the killings took place in Utah and two in Colorado, according to KSL. He remains in custody, held as of 2023 at the federal high-security penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, according to the Wikipedia article.

Kimball was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1966 and had a long record of check fraud and other theft offenses in Montana, Alaska and Colorado before the killings. In 2002, while held at the federal prison in Englewood, he came to the attention of FBI agent Carle Schlaff, and in December 2002 he was released on an unsecured bond to work as a paid informant in a drug and murder-for-hire investigation, according to reporting by The Atavist magazine. The AP noted in 2010 that all four killings happened after that release. The Wikipedia article says the information he supplied was largely of little use and in some cases false. He pleaded guilty to the Alaska fraud charges in March 2003 and was later sentenced to a fine, restitution and three years of federal probation, which ended his informant work.

The victims were all people Kimball knew. LeAnn Emry, 24, and Jennifer Marcum, 25, were girlfriends of men Kimball had met in prison, KSL reported. Emry disappeared in early 2003, and her car was later found in Moab, Utah. Marcum vanished in February 2003 after a dinner with Kimball, according to The Atavist. Kaysi McLeod, 19, the daughter of a woman Kimball married, went missing in August 2003 after failing to show up for a shift at work. Terry Kimball, his uncle, who had come to stay with the family to help care for Kimball's injured son, disappeared in 2004.

Kimball's freedom ended over a separate matter. On March 14, 2006, U.S. marshals trying to serve a federal weapons warrant pursued him from Riverside, California, in a chase of more than three hours that ended in a farm field, where he surrendered, The Atavist reported. In May 2006 he received 10 months in jail and six months in a halfway house on the weapons charge, and he also served a Montana sentence for violating probation. By 2009 he was also serving 48 years for theft and for being a habitual criminal, according to KSL. In April 2007 a skull found in the Routt National Forest near Walden, Colorado, was identified through DNA as Kaysi McLeod's, which Wikipedia says gave investigators leverage.

Facing possible murder charges, Kimball accepted a deal under which he would lead investigators to bodies. He took them to Emry's remains in the Book Cliffs area of eastern Utah, north of Moab, and admitted shooting her there, KSL reported. He also led them to his uncle's body, buried near Vail Pass in Colorado. He said he had buried Marcum in the Book Cliffs, but the sites he pointed to were empty and her remains have not been found. At the October 2009 hearing, Marcum's father told the court that Kimball had destroyed the family's lives, and her sister asked him to reveal where her body lay. In early 2011 Kimball wrote a letter to his family in which, according to Wikipedia, he described all four deaths and revised several earlier accounts, including saying that Marcum died of a drug overdose he prepared and that McLeod died of an overdose in his presence.

Investigators have examined Kimball in connection with other unsolved cases, but he has not been charged with any further killing. The AP reported in August 2010 that the FBI was investigating several missing-person cases without saying in which states. The Wikipedia article says he has been suspected in as many as 21 other deaths and that the FBI looked at him in the October 2004 killing of Catrina Powell in Westminster, Colorado, though no charge followed. Agent Schlaff was suspended after an internal FBI review and left the bureau in 2013, according to The Atavist.

In October 2017 Logan County prosecutors said Kimball would be charged with attempted escape and solicitation to commit murder over a plot at the Sterling Correctional Facility, CBS Colorado reported. He pleaded guilty to attempted escape in 2020 and received four years, concurrent with his existing terms; the solicitation counts were dropped, according to The Atavist. In 2021 CBS Colorado found that he had been moved under an interstate compact to the federal prison at Coleman, Florida, with a listed release date in 2082.