The phone call was chilling.
Ken Holmgren didn’t talk to his father often, but during that February 1991 call, Elmer Holmgren told his son that if he didn’t hear from him again in a few days, he should call an agent with the ATF, the federal agency now known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“Panic struck,” Ken Holmgren, 71, told “Dateline.” “I really didn’t know who he was working for.”
He said he knew that his father, a lawyer who’d struggled to find work after the death of his employer in Florida, had moved to Las Vegas and was working for a wealthy couple, Kenneth and Sante Kimes.
But Ken Holmgren didn’t know about Sante’s lengthy criminal history, mostly for theft-related charges, he said. Nor did he know that she’d recently served three years in a federal prison for charges of indentured servitude. She and her husband — who took a plea agreement in the case — had been accused of abusing young undocumented women whom they’d recruited to work as housekeepers.
Holmgren never heard from his father again. But less than a decade later, Sante Kimes captured national attention with a pair of brutal and puzzling crimes that spanned thousands of miles. Sante Kimes and her younger son, Kenny Kimes Jr., were charged and convicted in separate trials in connection with two 1998 murder plots — the killing of a New York City socialite, Irene Silverman, and the fatal shooting of a Los Angeles businessman, David Kazdin.
During his trial for Kazdin’s killing, the son confessed to a third murder — the killing of a bank executive who’d gone missing in the Bahamas in 1996 while investigating irregularities in the Kimes’ offshore bank accounts.
Now, decades later, the mystery of what happened to Elmer remains. As does his son’s frustration that, in his view, authorities never seemed to have sought answers in the disappearance. Holmgren said that it’s even more maddening given that when he vanished, his father was cooperating with the ATF as a witness against Sante Kimes and her husband in a suspected arson at their Honolulu home — an arrangement that Holmgren said he later learned of from a special agent with the ATF.
“If the ATF would have done their job, there would have been several more people that wouldn’t have lost their lives,” he said. “That’s the way I look at it.”
A spokesperson for the ATF would not comment. The person Holmgren identified as the special agent who provided information about his father’s role in the fire and his apparent cooperation with the bureau retired from the ATF and did not return a message seeking comment.
In response to a public records request from “Dateline” for documents linked to the suspected arson in Honolulu — as well as another possible arson at a Las Vegas property that belonged to the Kimes — the bureau’s parent agency, the Department of Justice, provided a management log last fall. The document said that all but one piece of evidence had been destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, where federal offices were located.
In 2003, most of that remaining evidence was returned to representatives for Sante and Kenny Kimes Jr., according to the log. The bureau would only provide them with copies of a photo album whose ownership was unclear, the log states.
Sante Kimes died in 2014 at a New York prison at 79. Kenneth Kimes Sr. died in 1994. The couple was never charged with any crimes in connection with the suspected arson. A spokesperson for the ATF would not comment. Police reports obtained through a public records request from the Honolulu Police Department, which also investigated the fire and describe the blaze as a suspected arson, do not provide an explanation of the case’s outcome.
Kenny Kimes Jr., 49, was a teenager at the time of the fire and is not suspected in Elmer’s disappearance. He is serving a sentence of life without parole at a California state prison.
Living the high life
The fire erupted around 1 a.m. on Sept. 16, 1990, in the Kimes’ beachfront home southeast of Honolulu. Video from the time showed the house fully engulfed in flames.
It wasn’t the only home that belonged to the Kimes. Kenneth Kimes Sr. had made his fortune in real estate, and the family had multiple properties in Hawaii, as well as in Las Vegas and an oceanfront estate in the Bahamas, said Kent Walker, Sante Kimes’ older son from a previous marriage.
“Our lives were beyond the American dream,” Walker told “Dateline.”
Honolulu fire investigators determined the blaze had multiple points of origin — the primary bedroom, dining room, living room — and described its cause as incendiary, indicating it was intentionally set, according to the Honolulu Police Department’s case file on the fire.
A follow-up report included in the file, which was obtained through a public records request, described a recent legal dispute over the property’s sale: After a buyer in Colorado paid $1.7 million for it the prior year, the money was placed in escrow. But a person whose name is redacted in the document “reneged on the deal giving various excuses for not selling,” according to the report, which cited a representative for the buyer.
The property had a $900,000 lien on it, the representative said, and a trial over the dispute was scheduled for Jan. 21, 1991 — four months after the house burned.
According to an incident report included in the records request, a person whose name is redacted in the document is described as having hired a suspect to burn her home. (The suspect’s name is also redacted.) The homeowner then filed an insurance claim seeking $1.4 million, the report states.
Vanished while in protective custody
A few months after the fire, Holmgren said, he got the first of two phone calls from his father. In the first conversation, Holmgren recalled, his father told him he was working for the Kimes and appeared reluctant to even be on the phone.
“I gotta make this short,” he recalled his father saying.
A few weeks later, in early February, Elmer called again and provided his son with the names of two ATF agents in Honolulu, said Ken Holmgren, who at the time was living in Florida and working as a contractor for a power company.
If Elmer didn’t get back to him in three days, Ken Holmgren recalls him saying, his father instructed him to call the bureau.
“It was very stressful,” Ken Holmgren said.
A few days later, when Holmgren still hadn’t heard from his father, he dialed one of the agents while at work and left a message.
Shortly after, Holmgren said, two carloads of ATF agents appeared at his job. The person who took the message had garbled it, he said, and believed that Holmgren was actually his father.
“My boss was a little taken aback, but he was very understanding,” Holmgren said.
Initially, he said, the ATF agent offered few details about his father’s link to the bureau. Elmer was supposed to have been in protective custody, he recalled the agent saying, but “they lost track of him.” (A spokesperson for the agency said the ATF places people in protective custody with the United States Marshals Service when there is a perceived or known threat to a person’s safety.)
A couple months later, Holmgren said, the agent offered more details: His father had been involved in the suspected arson at the Kimes’ Honolulu property — a fact that Elmer revealed to a friend at a bar. That friend then shared that information with authorities, Holmgren said the agent told him.
