Decades After His Father Disappeared, a Son Questions the Role of a Notorious Criminal

Before Sante and Kenny Kimes Jr. were convicted of multiple murders, a man working for Sante vanished without a trace. His son is still searching for answers.

The phone call was unsettling.

Ken Holmgren didn’t speak to his father often, but during a February 1991 conversation, Elmer Holmgren issued an alarming directive. If Ken didn’t hear from him in a few days, he should contact an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

“I panicked,” Ken Holmgren, now 71, told “Dateline.” “I really didn’t know who he was working for.”

Elmer Holmgren, a lawyer struggling to rebuild his career after his Florida employer’s death, had relocated to Las Vegas and was working for Kenneth and Sante Kimes, a wealthy but dubious couple. However, Ken Holmgren was unaware of Sante’s extensive criminal background, primarily involving theft. He also didn’t know that she had recently served three years in federal prison for charges related to indentured servitude, having exploited undocumented women as housekeepers.

Elmer Holmgren was never heard from again.

Nearly a decade later, Sante Kimes and her son, Kenny Kimes Jr., gained national notoriety for their involvement in two grisly 1998 murders—New York socialite Irene Silverman and Los Angeles businessman David Kazdin. During his trial, Kenny Jr. also confessed to a third murder, that of a Bahamian banker investigating irregularities in the Kimes’ offshore accounts in 1996.

Despite these high-profile cases, the mystery surrounding Elmer Holmgren’s disappearance remains unsolved. His son remains frustrated that authorities never seemed to actively investigate what happened to his father. The lack of effort is especially troubling, Ken Holmgren said, given that Elmer had been cooperating with the ATF as a witness against Sante and Kenneth Kimes Sr. in a suspected arson case involving their Honolulu home.

“If the ATF had done their job, several more people might not have lost their lives,” Holmgren said.

The Fire That Raised Questions

On September 16, 1990, a fire erupted at the Kimes’ beachfront property near Honolulu. Video footage showed the home engulfed in flames. Honolulu fire investigators determined that the fire had multiple points of origin and classified it as incendiary—an intentional act.

A legal dispute over the property had arisen just before the fire. A buyer in Colorado had paid $1.7 million for the estate, but the seller later reneged on the deal. The house had a $900,000 lien on it, and a trial over the dispute was set for January 1991—four months after the fire.

According to police reports, an individual (whose name was redacted) allegedly hired someone to set the fire and later filed an insurance claim for $1.4 million. The case’s final outcome remains unclear, and neither Sante nor Kenneth Kimes Sr. was ever charged.

A Vanishing in Protective Custody

Months after the fire, Elmer Holmgren reached out to his son. In their second phone call, he provided Ken with the names of two ATF agents in Honolulu and instructed him to contact the bureau if he didn’t hear from him in three days.

Ken Holmgren tried calling one of the agents but received no response. Shortly after, two carloads of ATF agents appeared at his workplace, mistakenly believing he was Elmer. The agents eventually confirmed that Elmer had been placed in protective custody but had inexplicably gone missing.

Later, an ATF agent informed Ken that his father had become a witness in the arson case after allegedly discussing the crime with a friend at a bar. Authorities then approached Elmer, and he agreed to cooperate against the Kimes family. Two weeks before his disappearance, Elmer met with ATF agents in his Las Vegas apartment. According to Ken, Sante and Kenneth Kimes Sr. interrupted that meeting.

“My father just told the Kimes that they were friends of his and they were just having a beer, talking,” Ken recalled the agent telling him. “That was the last time anyone saw my dad.”

A Chilling Confession?

In 1992, about a year and a half after Elmer vanished, Kent Walker, Sante Kimes’ older son from a previous marriage, overheard a disturbing argument between his mother and stepfather at their Las Vegas home. According to Walker’s 2001 memoir, “Son of a Grifter,” the dispute revolved around a man’s death. Kenneth Kimes Sr. accused Sante of striking a man with a hammer in their car, while Sante blamed Kenneth for holding the victim down.

Walker contacted local authorities, but without a victim’s identity, the report went nowhere. Years later, when Walker saw news reports about Elmer’s disappearance, he believed his stepfather’s argument had been about him.

Despite this, Walker claims the ATF never questioned him about what he had overheard. To this day, no significant progress has been made in solving the case.

A Case Left to Linger

Ken Holmgren is convinced his father is dead. At one point, an ATF agent suggested that, theoretically, Elmer could have escaped to a tropical hideaway. But the agent admitted it was unlikely since the statute of limitations on his father’s possible charges had long expired.

In his final conversation with that ATF agent, roughly a year before Sante Kimes’ arrest in 1998, Ken Holmgren received a quiet apology.

“I’m sorry,” he recalled the agent saying. “We dropped the ball.”

To Holmgren, his father was a good man who had simply fallen into a dangerous situation he couldn’t escape.

“He got caught up in something he didn’t know how to get out of,” Holmgren said. “And it cost him his life.”