Her decades-long crime spree – including throughout her marriage to her second husband, millionaire Kenneth Kimes Sr., then continuing with theft and fraud against his estate by hiding his death for years – did not end until she was arrested for the murder of Irene Silverman in New York City.

Sante admitted to her son that she murdered the partner in one of her arsons, Elmer Ambrose Holmgren, who had disappeared during a trip to Costa Rica with her; no charges were brought in this crime.

[4] When she was a teenager, Sante moved with her mother and sister to Los Angeles, California, and was promptly adopted by Edwin and Mary Chambers, along with another boy.

[7] Sante spent the better part of her life fleecing people of money, expensive merchandise and real estate, either through arson, elaborate con games, forgery or outright theft.

[8] She frequently offered young, homeless undocumented immigrants housing and employment, then kept them as virtual prisoners by threatening to report them to the authorities if they did not follow her orders.

On September 18, 1990, Sante hired 50-year-old lawyer Elmer Ambrose Holmgren to burn her Honolulu home due to a lien on the property, and the fact it would have cost US$900,000 (equivalent to $2.1 million in 2023) to sell it.

[13] Kenneth Jr. confessed to murdering 46-year-old banker Syed Bilal Ahmed, who was in charge of Sante's offshore bank accounts, at his mother's behest in Nassau, Bahamas, on September 4, 1996,[14] which had been suspected by Bahamian authorities at the time.

Sante denied any involvement in or knowledge of the murders, and she claimed that Kenneth Jr. confessed solely to avoid receiving the death penalty.

[13] When he was arrested, Kenneth Jr. had in his possession Silverman's keys, cassettes of her tape-recorded calls, loaded firearms, wigs, masks, plastic handcuffs, $30,000 in cash (equivalent to $56,000 in 2023), an empty stun gun box and a substance similar to a "date rape" drug.

[13] During the trial for Kazdin's murder, Kenneth Jr. confessed that after his mother had used a stun gun on Silverman, he strangled her, stuffed her corpse into a bag and deposited it in a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey.

He was told of several potential felony charges stemming from the murder and mortgage fraud, and reluctantly agreed to cooperate with police in apprehending the pair to avoid prosecution.

At the end of June 1998, Patterson got a call from Sante about an expensive townhouse in New York's Upper West Side she wanted to sell, and she needed his help with the paperwork.

Nonetheless, the jury voted unanimously – on their first poll – to convict Sante and Kenneth Jr. not only of murder but of 117 other charges including robbery, burglary, conspiracy, grand larceny, illegal weapons possession, forgery and eavesdropping.

[23] The judge also took the unusual step of ordering Sante not to speak to the media even after the jury had been sequestered, as a result of her passing a note to New York Times reporter David Rhode in court.

[24] During the sentencing portion of the Silverman trial, Sante made a prolonged statement to the court blaming the authorities, including the Kimeses lawyers, for framing her and her son.

When the statement was concluded, the judge responded that Sante was a sociopath and a degenerate, and that her son was a dupe and a "remorseless predator", before imposing the maximum sentence on both of them.

In October 2000, while doing an prison interview, Kenneth Jr. held Court TV reporter Maria Zone hostage by pressing a ballpoint pen into her throat.

Sante again made a prolonged statement denying the murders and accusing police and prosecutors of various kinds of misconduct, and she was again eventually ordered by the presiding judge to be silent.

[28] Sante was returned to New York state to continue serving her first murder conviction, and died at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women on May 19, 2014.

In 2006, another TV movie based on a book about the case, A Little Thing Called Murder, starring Judy Davis and Jonathan Jackson, aired on Lifetime.