Original subtitles

- We got a call of an adult female found dead.

This lady was nude, and her hands were severed.

- So now we've gone from one, two, to three missing people.

- Are these people alive, or are they dead?

The person last seen with these women was Scott Kimball.

- This was not the first time I'd heard

Scott Kimball's name.

Scott had quite a prolific criminal history.

- Scott Kimball had been an informant for years.

Kimball had given the FBI a lot of good information.

- With Scott, I think he really knew how to play the game.

- We don't trust that Scott's gonna tell us the truth.

- My boss came out to me and said,

"Jonny, we've got a problem."

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

This is "FBI True."

- Hey, guys. How's it going?

- Hi.

- Katharina Booth served as first assistant district

attorney in Boulder County, Colorado.

She specialized in sexual assault and domestic violence.

- What's going on, Gary?

Good to see you.

- Gary Thatcher was a police detective

in Lafayette, Colorado.

He then served as a senior investigator for the DA's

office in Boulder, where he specialized in sexual assault

and homicide.

- Hey, FBI.

- For 25 years, Jonny Grusing was a special agent

in the FBI's Denver office, where he specialized

in violent crime, including missing

persons and serial killers.

- Jonny, when did you become involved in this case?

- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs, crimes against children, as well

as human and drug trafficking.

- I got involved in November 2006

when I was sitting in the squad area of our task force,

and my boss came out to me and said,

Jonny, we've got a problem.

He said he had just been talking to this man--

his name is Bob--

who had been on a crusade to find his daughter, Jennifer.

Jennifer was in her mid-twenties,

around 25 years old.

And she was a bodybuilder and a stripper at a club in Denver.

She just vanished.

Jennifer's dad had figured out that the person last

seen with his daughter was an FBI

informant named Scott Kimball.

Scott Kimball had been an informant for years.

He would get involved in a check fraud or forgery,

get sent to prison, and then he would find out

there's this plot.

My cellmate wants to go have someone killed on the outside.

So he would then go report that to law enforcement.

In exchange for being an informant, Scott

received $18,000 from the FBI.

- Gary, what are you working when

you get the call from Jonny?

- So I was a new detective with Lafayette Police Department.

And generally, when you're a newer detective,

you get assigned to check fraud, forgery.

And Scott Kimball was our suspect in that case.

Initially, we were trying to find Scott Kimball,

and we contact his ex-wife Lori McLeod...

And find out from Lori that her daughter,

Kaysi, was also missing.

Lori didn't report her daughter missing

because Scott Kimball gave her the impression

that Kaysi had run away.

- So you're there for check fraud,

and then all of a sudden, the mother, the wife is like, oh,

and by the way, Detective, my daughter's missing?

- Scott Kimball and Steve Ennis were

cellmates in a Denver prison.

Steve was in there for drug violations,

Scott for check fraud, forgery.

Steve has girlfriend, Jennifer--

this is the one whose dad, Bob, came into our office

and reported her missing.

Steve wants to get Jennifer out of stripping.

So Scott comes up with a plan.

He tells Steve, I'm about to get out of prison.

When I get out, I'll set up for her a coffee shop in Seattle.

I own a lot of them.

So we'll get her out of stripping.

Steve is like, that's fantastic.

So he gives Scott Jennifer's number.

And we even have Steve, on some of these prison calls,

talking to Jennifer that he's excited

that Scott's gonna get her out of the stripping business.

- However, Scott's reporting separately to the FBI

that the real reason that he's talking to Jennifer

is because Jennifer has been tasked

by Steve to go kill people.

And Scott told us that he's the person that could stop

these murders from happening.

- Scott is a bad guy that had access to other bad guys

and was reporting to law enforcement--

in this case, the FBI-- like, hey,

I know a murder-for-hire plot.

- That's it.

- He gets opened as a source.

- Yes.

- Katharina, you were the prosecutor that

handled this investigation.

- That's right.

- How did you come across this case?

- This was not the first time I had heard Scott Kimball's name.

Scott had a quite prolific criminal history--

insurance fraud, check fraud and forgery.

I had not been a white-collar case prosecutor.

I had always been a person's crimes,

crimes against children, crimes against women specifically.

I wanted to take this case.

- So we go interview Lori.

This was early 2007.

Her daughter had now been missing for 3 1/2 years.

And she gave us two bags of trash from Scott Kimball

that she had held on to from the day

her daughter disappeared.

We gathered documents out of that.

And then as we're about to leave, she says,

I also know about Uncle Terry.

Uncle Terry was Scott's uncle.

We were like, well, what's going on with Uncle Terry?

Uncle Terry came up to Denver fresh off a divorce.

And we found out he was carrying $15,000 in cash

'cause he took the divorce settlements

directly from the bank.

And he came to Lori's house.

He's only there for one, maybe two weeks.

But he also won the lottery.

It's an Ohio state lottery.

He met a stripper named Ginger.

They have this relationship, and they went to Mexico.

- What happens after you learn that Uncle Terry

won the lottery in Ohio?

- I did get a subpoena from the U.S. Attorney's

to send up there to see if he won the Ohio state lottery.

His ex-wife was real interested in that also.

- OK.

- Yeah, but he did not.

- Lori didn't think he was completely missing,

because Scott was still receiving emails from Uncle

Terry from Mexico saying he was having a great time down

there with Ginger.

And he was showing those emails to Lori.

- So when you read the file, you see that

Kaysi is missing from the home

where Scott Kimball is her stepfather.

You also see that Jennifer is missing.

She is the girlfriend of Steve Ennis,

one of Scott Kimball's cellmates.

So now you have two girls missing,

missing Uncle Terry, that have a connection to Scott Kimball.

- You're starting to realize that you're just dealing

with somebody who's a much bigger monster than maybe

you had first anticipated.

- So I also used the U.S. Attorney's Office

to draft a search warrant to get in the last laptop Scott

was using.

Gary had seen some disturbing images on there.

- Yeah, what did you see?

- A lot of it was snuff film, snuff film type of content.

A lot of it was rape, bind, torture.

- He had a couple of pictures of women who looked like they

were just posing for him.

These women were about the same ages as Kaysi and Jennifer.

So I didn't know if they were missing or not.

- And then eventually we ran an ad,

front page of the "Rocky Mountain News,"

with pictures-- do you know who these women are?

- I hit up the BAU.

The profiler said, whatever you can do to change this

from a missing person to a homicide case--

because we don't think these people are alive,

but nobody knows.

And I'm like, sounds good, but I don't

know how to do that either. - Right.

- So that was the advice.

But that was Gary and I's goal was to find out,

are these people alive, or are they dead?

So next, we go interview Scott.

He is just cool as a cucumber.

And I say we're trying to get to the bottom of two things.

One, people tend to disappear when they're around you.

And two, I really want to find out more

about you being our informant because there's

a lot of questions there.

We're not there for very long at all.

And he says, I'll have a pizza.

- I'm sorry, pizza?

- Yes.

I looked through the one-way glass, which my boss is looking

at me, for, like, help.

You know, what do you do here?

And, uh, yeah, we end up ordering the pizza.

- We train for this type of stuff when we do interviews.

And normally, you don't want your suspect

taking any kind of control within an interview.

But with Scott, I think he really

knew how to play the game.

He's worked enough with law enforcement.

And having been an informant, we had to spend hours with him

to get five minutes of information.

- Jonny and I would always joke that, you know,

Scott could sprinkle pixie dust in the room

and just make everybody confused

about everything that was going on in every conversation.

- It's so draining. - Yeah.

- What do you learn?

Anything good?

- He says Uncle Terry is alive, and he can help us find him.

He says Kaysi was last seen in Arizona.

Same thing.

He thinks he can help us find her.

- Mainly, he points back at Steve,

and that's his former cellmate.

And he said Steve Ennis is involved in Jennifer's

disappearance, that Jennifer's dead, that Steve

Ennis was responsible.

So Gary and I interviewed Steve Ennis, and all he did,

Gary, as I remember, is him crying.

I'm sad.

Hey, I wanted to marry this woman.

I love her.

I don't know why she left.

So we were, at the end of our interview,

just kind of figuring, kind of wasted our time.

The guards come in, and I say, Steve Ennis,

anything else going on?

He's like, well, yeah, there's another inmate

named Steve who lost his girlfriend to Kimball.

We're like, what do you mean another inmate?

And he said, yeah, this guy, Steve Holley,

had lost his girlfriend to Kimball also.

And by now, Gary and I had been working this together

for a year about, you know?

And we had never heard of any other inmate's

girlfriend going missing.

So we're like, tell me what happened.

And he says, I don't have any details.

I just know there's another inmate named Steve Holley,

and his girlfriend goes missing as soon as Scott gets out.

- I remember it being a long plane ride home

because we knew that we had more work,

and potentially, we might have another victim on our hands.

It kept piling up and piling up.

- As you guys are putting this puzzle together,

we have another missing person.

- We interviewed Steve Holley, who had robbed multiple banks.

He had life sentence in prison.

He told us the story of how his girlfriend, Leann, disappeared.

- And what does he tell you?

- He said that prior to Kimball getting out of prison,

they made a deal with each other.

Holley said, when you get out-- 'cause Scott

was about to get out--

I want you to get me and my girlfriend

down to Mexico together.

And he said, my girlfriend's name is Leann.

You guys need to get some money and stuff,

and you come break me out of prison

and get me down to Mexico with my girlfriend.

Holley tells us, once he set this plan in motion for Kimball

to go get his girlfriend, break him out of jail,

get him down to Mexico, Kimball gets released,

and immediately, Steve Holley's locked down to where

he has no phone privileges.

He says, when I am locked down, I know what Kimball did.

I know he took my girlfriend.

I know he took Leann.

- Why is he so sure?

- Because he introduced Kimball to Leann under the name

Hannibal, for Hannibal Lecter from "Silence of the Lambs."

Scott chose that name.

Scott said, when you introduce me to Leann,

she can only know me as Hannibal,

because I'm working this big drug case,

and nobody can know my true name.

And we found, when we did search warrants

on her texts and her emails,

she refers to Scott as Hannibal.

So Leann was a straight-A student.

She rebels.

She gets into stripping and starts

living a high-risk lifestyle and starts meeting people like

Steve Holley, our bank robber.

Once he's in prison, she's waiting for him to get out.

And so this Hannibal guy comes and meets her and says,

I'm going to get you together with your boyfriend.

But first, you need to write a bunch of bad checks.

Leann, having not committed any crime in her life that we could

see, goes on a tear and writes about $25,000 worth

of bad checks around Denver.

And she doesn't spend any of it.

She just disappears.

Her car is left across the state line right in Utah.

And that's the last anybody had heard from her.

- Has anybody reported Leann missing?

- Yes.

I look at Leann's dad actually calling the FBI,

and I'm able to find that complaint call.

And he said, I know from an inmate, Steve Holley,

that Hannibal took my daughter.

And as you know-- you were on complaint duty.

- Yeah.

- I mean, you might as well have said, aliens have landed.

- Right.

- It sounded like one of those crazy complaint calls.

- Mm-hmm.

- One of the images that we found on Scott's computer

was a picture of Leann Emry.

And she had her hair dyed.

So she's also on his computer.

- That's chilling.

So now we've gone from one, two,

three to four missing people.

Do we go talk to Kimball again?

- We do.

Scott says, so what if one of these victims

is in U.S. forest land?

- During our first interview with Scott,

he had referenced taking his camper

up into some national forest.

- Kimball said at the time Kaysi went missing,

he was out elk hunting.

- When Kimball mentioned national forest land,

that's what made me remember a receipt from Lori's trash.

- So from the trash that his wife, Lori, had given you,

the two bags of his stuff, you went through it,

and you found a receipt.

- It was from a grocery store in Walden.

- And for some reason, that stuck in your mind.

- Well, that was the day Kaysi disappeared.

And that showed he was up in Walden, which, like Gary said,

we kind of knew he was up in that area anyway.

Because of Scott mentioning the forest land,

I went ahead and called the U.S. Forest Service anyway.

The lady that I spoke with, I just tell her, we're

looking for a missing person up there.

I didn't know if you'd recovered anyone.

And she said, well, we had a female hiker who was recovered

just before the snow.

- Wow.

- That's all she said.

- We met with the sheriff up there,

and he said they took her remains and they transferred

her bones down to CSU.

So we literally drove straight from there down

to Fort Collins.

We immediately take the bones as evidence

and drove them to FBI that night to get

the DNA analysis done on them.

- You've got a box of bones, and it's probably Kaysi.

What are you feeling?

- It was a long ride.

I remember Johnny and I are just-- we're literally

driving in his car back on I-25,

and there's a box in the back seat.

And this is the case you've been working

for a couple of years now.

- Yeah.

- And the key to that case might

be sitting in the backseat.

- We just have to match the DNA inside

these bones to being Kaysi's.

So we compared a sample from Lori.

We sent that, along with the remains, to our lab.

And because this was making a lot of news

and because it involved an FBI informant,

I got the results back in less than two weeks.

- Wow.

- I remember the anticipation of waiting for those results--

I still thought it was the fastest we've

ever gotten DNA results in anything that I

can remember in my career--

and the day that we got the confirmation that it was Kaysi.

The entire case was now moving in our direction.

Finding Kaysi changed the entire dynamic.

And that power and that control flipped.

And now, finally, we had something

we could move forward on.

- It was a somber feeling to--

to even be thinking about we're gonna have to do notifications

to the family and those types of things,

because we'd grown close with the family.

- We don't trust that Scott's gonna tell us the truth.

And in order for us to get any faith that he's gonna give us

the bodies, which is what the victims wanted,

we had him plead, what we say, straight up

to all of the charges, including

the habitual criminal counts.

- The other side of the coin on the bargaining with him,

though, is he's not gonna cooperate if you give

him a 100-year sentence.

- Right.

- He's just gonna walk away, go to his cell,

and he's not gonna tell us where Leann and Jennifer are.

- Ultimately, then, he would plead

to two counts of second-degree murder,

not first-degree, which is the highest count in Colorado.

- Right.

- That gave us a 48-year sentence.

Right after court, we go back to the judge's chambers,

and Kimball starts boasting about the kinds

of equipment and things we're going

to need to recover the bodies.

And I got sick to my stomach.

And I actually wrote a note that said,

we just made a deal with the devil,

and passed it to the jail deputy.

- So if Scott Kimball is gonna show you where the bodies are,

that means you're gonna have to take him out of prison.

How does that work?

- He had just done a very simple map and said,

Leann is here.

And then he said, 15 miles away, Jennifer is here.

And he goes, I can get you to both of them in a day.

- What's that like, pulling him out to take him on a field trip

to look for bodies?

- For us, it was quite the ops plan.

Our SWAT team was out there, evidence response

team, the prosecutors.

We had defense attorneys.

We had the sheriffs.

And then we had us as investigators.

So it was a long line of SUVs with tinted windows.

- It's vast.

There's nothing out there--

a few oil derricks, just dirt roads that kind of go

off in different directions.

Needle in a haystack out there.

- Yeah, you don't find anything out there unless Scott

takes you right to it.

- We had kept trying to find Jennifer and Leann.

He kept pointing to different creek beds for Jennifer.

Our guys kept digging.

One time, he said, Merry Christmas,

and he stood on a certain spot.

- Merry Christmas. Dig here.

Ugh. - Yeah.

- And we all dug. - Yep.

- And we didn't find her.

- Our third trip up there, he started getting giddy,

like he was in that judge's chambers.

And he started saying, I have a good feeling about this.

If we find a waterfall, maybe Leann will be here.

And we walked to this pile of rocks that's about, you know,

as tall as this ceiling.

It doesn't look like a real waterfall.

But he points down to his right and says, there's a bone.

And one of the sheriff's deputies there

who had been assessing everything

said, it looks like a sheep bone.

And so Scott says, all right, well, let's head back this way.

And they start walking down the creek bed.

I didn't know if it was a human bone or a sheep bone

or whatever, but something about it

just made me start hiking up to see if there's

more wherever that came from.

And I hiked for probably three minutes,

maybe up, just negotiating, trying to go vertically.

And I ran into a gray hair clip with brown and blonde hair.

We had both for Leann.

We had darker hair, and we had blonde hair.

And the hair clip had both inside of it.

- And what are you feeling at that moment, Jon?

- I could barely talk.

And so I tried to call out for the search team the first time,

but it stuck in my throat.

I couldn't say it well enough.

And then I said, I think I found Leann.

And the search team came around with Kimball.

Kimball was standing up above me.

We've all three seen this look.

It's just a very flat look.

It's no emotion.

And Scott looks at me and says, that's not her.

Let's keep moving.

- But you were thinking what?

- I knew it was her.

- We found Uncle Terry.

We did not take Scott with us on this particular outing.

Sometimes, it's just easier to not work with Scott.

But off the map that he gave us,

we were able to find Uncle Terry.

He was above ground, wrapped in a tarp.

And we were able to take him back and do an autopsy

and get a positive confirmation on him as well.

- The coroner found a bullet in Uncle Terry's skull,

and it matched the same gun that

was used to kill Leann Emry.

Kaysi's cause of death was undetermined.

- Ultimately, because we were unable to find Jennifer's body,

the plea negotiations changed.

We secured a 70-year sentence, ensuring that Kimball

would never get out of prison.

- What did this case mean to you?

- It teaches you a lot.

Taught you how to work with other agencies, and, you know,

just keep grinding away and don't give up.

- This case will live with all of us our entire lives.

I think the thing I think about the most

is trying to get justice and resolve for those victims.

- The FBI's always learning--

- Yes.

- --on how to treat informants better and how

we can be more diligent in vetting

the information they give us.

This taught all of us how to be better investigators.