Criminal Behavior
According to court records, Kimes was born Sandra Louise Walker in Oklahoma City to a mother of partial Dutch descent and an East Indian father. Her estranged son, Kent Walker, in his book Son of a Grifter has reported from an old acquaintance of his mother that Sante Kimes was the daughter of a respectable family who was unable to cope with the young girl's aberrant, wild antics; Kimes herself has claimed that her father was a laborer and that her mother was a prostitute who migrated from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl to Los Angeles, where the young Kimes ran wild in the streets. But Sante Kimes has given numerous, conflicting stories about her origins and numerous other accounts are difficult to confirm, and thus Kent Walker says that his ancestry could be anything from Latino to East Indian to Indigenous American to simply white. She spent the better part of her life fleecing people of money, expensive merchandise, and real estate, either through elaborate con games, arson, forgery, or outright theft.
According to the book Son of a Grifter, she committed insurance fraud on numerous occasions, frequently by committing arson and then collecting for property damage. She delighted in introducing her husband as an ambassador - a ploy that even gained the couple access to a White House reception during the Ford administration. And she sometimes even impersonated Elizabeth Taylor, whom she resembled slightly. He also alleges that she committed many acts of fraud that were not even financially necessary, such as enslaving maids when she could easily afford to pay them and burning down houses she could have easily sold.
She frequently offered young, homeless illegal immigrants housing and employment, then kept them virtual prisoners by threatening to report them to the authorities if they didn't follow her orders. As a result, she and her second husband, alcoholic motel tycoon Kenneth Kimes, spent years squandering his fortune on lawyers' fees, defending themselves against charges of slavery. Kimes was eventually arrested in August 1985 and was sentenced by the U.S. District Court to five years in prison for violating Federal anti-slavery laws. Her husband took a plea bargain and agreed to complete an alcohol treatment program; Ken, Sr. and their son, Kenny, lived a somewhat normal life until Sante was released from prison in 1989. Ken, Sr. died in 1994.
Read more about this topic: Sante Kimes
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