It was a terrifying phone call.
Elmer Holmgren advised his son to contact an agent with the ATF, the government organization now known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, if he didn’t hear from his father in a few days. Ken Holmgren didn’t speak to his father very often.
Ken Holmgren, 71, told Dateline that he was in a panic. I had no idea who he was employed by.
He claimed to be aware that his father, a lawyer who had been struggling to find employment in Florida following the death of his employer, had relocated to Las Vegas and was now employed by Kenneth and Sante Kimes, a wealthy couple.
However, he said that Ken Holmgren was unaware of Sante’s extensive criminal record, which was primarily related to theft-related crimes. He was also unaware that she had just been imprisoned for three years in a federal prison on indentured servitude charges. She was accused of assaulting young, undocumented women they had hired to work as housekeepers, together with her husband, who entered into a plea deal in the case.
His father never got back to Holmgren. However, Sante Kimes gained national prominence less than ten years later for two heinous and perplexing crimes that covered thousands of miles. In separate trials, Sante Kimes and her younger son, Kenny Kimes Jr., were prosecuted and found guilty of two murder conspiracies in 1998: the shooting death of Los Angeles businessman David Kazdin and the murder of New York City socialite Irene Silverman.
The son admitted to a third murder during his trial for Kazdin’s murder—the 1996 disappearance of a bank executive in the Bahamas while looking into anomalies in the Kimes’ offshore bank accounts.
Decades later, the question surrounding Elmer’s fate still stands. His son is also frustrated since, in his opinion, officials never looked for answers regarding the disappearance. It’s even more frustrating, according to Holmgren, because when he disappeared, his father was working with the ATF as a witness against Sante Kimes and her husband in a suspected arson at their Honolulu house. Holmgren claimed to have later learned of this arrangement from an ATF special agent.
He stated that a number of additional individuals would not have died if the ATF had performed its duties. That’s my perspective on it.
An ATF representative declined to comment. Holmgren did not respond to a message requesting response from the special agent he cited as the source of information regarding his father’s involvement in the fire and his apparent collaboration with the ATF bureauretired.
The Department of Justice, the bureau’s parent agency, produced a management log last autumn in response to Dateline’s public records request for data related to the suspected Honolulu fire and another potential arson at a Kimes property in Las Vegas. According to the document, the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, destroyed all but one piece of evidence, including government offices.
According to the log, the majority of the remaining material was given back to Sante and Kenny Kimes Jr.’s agents in 2003. According to the log, the bureau would only provide them copies of a photo album whose ownership was ambiguous.
At the age of 79, Sante Kimes passed away in a New York prison in 2014. In 1994, Kenneth Kimes Sr. passed away. No criminal charges were ever brought against the couple in relation to the alleged arson. An ATF representative declined to comment. The Honolulu Police Department, which also looked into the fire and described it as a suspected arson, provided police reports that were obtained through a public records request; however, they did not explain how the investigation turned out.
Elmer’s disappearance is not considered to have included 49-year-old Kenny Kimes Jr., who was a teenager at the time of the fire. He is incarcerated in a California state prison for life without the possibility of parole.
Living the high life
On September 16, 1990, at around one in the morning, the Kimes oceanfront house southeast of Honolulu caught fire. The property was completely engulfed in flames, according to footage taken at the time.
The Kimes owned more than just the house. According to Kent Walker, Sante Kimes’ older son from a previous marriage, Kenneth Kimes Sr. built his fortune in real estate, and the family owned several estates in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and an oceanfront estate in the Bahamas.
Walker told Dateline, “Our lives were beyond the American dream.”
According to the Honolulu Police Department’s case file on the incident, investigators found that the fire had many sites of origin, including the main bedroom, dining room, and living room. They also described the fire’s cause as incendiary, meaning it was started on purpose.
The file contained a follow-up report that detailed a recent court battle over the sale of the property and was acquired through a public records request: It was put in escrow last year after a buyer in Colorado paid $1.7 million for it. However, according to the report, which referenced a buyer’s representative, a person whose name is redacted in the paper reneged on the arrangement, offering a variety of reasons for not selling.
According to the representative, a trial about the $900,000 lien on the property was set for January 21, 1991, four months after the house burnt.
A person whose identity is withheld in the incident report that was part of the documents request claims to have paid a suspect to set fire to her house. (The identity of the suspect has also been redacted.) According to the report, the homeowner subsequently submitted an insurance claim, requesting $1.4 million.
Vanished while in protective custody
Holmgren claimed that he received the first of two calls from his father a few months after the fire. Holmgren remembered that on the initial call, his father informed him that he was employed by the Kimes and seemed hesitant to speak on the phone at all.
He remembered his father saying, “I have to make this brief.”
A few weeks later, in early February, Elmer called once more and gave his son the names of two Honolulu-based ATF officers, according to Ken Holmgren, who was then a contractor for a power company in Florida.
Ken Holmgren remembers Elmer telling him that his father told him to phone the bureau if he didn’t respond to him within three days.
Ken Holmgren described it as really distressing.
Holmgren called one of the agents while at work and left a message a few days later when he still hadn’t heard from his father.
Holmgren claimed that two carloads of ATF agents showed up at his workplace shortly after. He said that the individual who received the message had distorted it and thought Holmgren was, in fact, his father.
Holmgren remarked, “My boss was a little surprised, but he was very understanding.”
He claimed that at first, the ATF agent provided little information regarding his father’s connection to the bureau. He remembered the agent telling him that Elmer should have been in protective custody, but they couldn’t find him. (According to an agency representative, when there is a known or suspected threat to an individual’s safety, ATF places them in protective custody with the US Marshals Service.)
According to Holmgren, the agent sent additional information a few months later: Elmer told a friend at a bar that his father had been engaged in the alleged arson at the Kimes Honolulu property. According to Holmgren, the agent informed him that the friend then gave that information to the authorities.