Scott Lee Kimball (born September 21, 1966) is a convicted serial killer, con man and fraudster from Boulder County, Colorado, who murdered at least four people over a two-year period; investigators strongly suspect him in as many as 21 other unsolved killings.

He is a skilled forger who, while he ran a legitimate business buying and selling organic beef, primarily enriched himself by passing bad checks on the accounts of others and using forged documents; by 2003 he had faced criminal charges in four Western states.

These white-collar crimes also enabled his murders, by allowing him to create evidence that his victims were still alive after he had killed them; he also used their checking accounts and credit cards to further his schemes once they were dead.

His second wife, who bore his two sons, claims he twice kidnapped and raped her; there was an open arrest warrant for him from the second assault, which occurred after he absconded from work release, at the time the FBI hired him as an informant.

[clarification needed] Members of Kimball's family and some investigators believe that a 2004 motor vehicle accident which severely injured his oldest son was in fact an attempt to kill the boy for insurance money; charges were never brought, due to conflicts between the jurisdictions where it could have been prosecuted.

[5] Kimball wrote a letter to the judge, begging him to sentence Peyton to additional prison time, stating, "[he has] denied me my right to a normal, healthy innocent childhood.

She recalls that process servers were frequent visitors to their house, as Kimball was running scams in the logging industry, and those who partnered with him and were cheated would often use legal means to recover their money.

[3] In March 2003, shortly after Jennifer Marcum, the first of four people Kimball later admitted killing, disappeared, he pleaded guilty in a Colorado federal court to the Alaska fraud charges.

[3] At one of their early meetings, Kimball told Schlaff that Steve Holley, another inmate he knew at Englewood, serving time for bank robbery, who had a history of escaping, was planning another attempt.

"[3] A week after writing that, on January 16, 2003,[3] Emry returned to her parents' home in Centennial, Colorado and packed her car for what she said was a trip to Mexico to go caving, a hobby of hers.

When some gas purchases on LeAnn's credit card made in California surfaced from the days after she had left Grand Junction, Howard regained hope that she was still alive.

[3] Within two weeks of his release from Englewood, Kimball made contact with Marcum, a 25-year-old high-school dropout who had moved to the Denver area with her young son from Illinois.

Price, he said, had shown him a photograph of her body, bound and gagged, before he put her in his trunk and drove to Rifle, Colorado, 150 miles (240 km) west of Denver, where he dumped it in a creek.

[3] Kaysi was Lori's 19-year-old daughter from one of her two previous marriages, who had run away from home on several occasions,[3] had been charged with credit card fraud,[16] and was recovering from methamphetamine addiction.

At the time her mother met Kimball, Kaysi's life seemed to be improving, She had been clean, again living with Lori, making new friends, and had taken a part-time job at a Subway nearby.

Law enforcement investigated, but since the two injuries had occurred in different jurisdictions it was unclear which agency should take the lead, and no charges were filed, to the consternation of Justin's mother.

The FBI traced it to a neighborhood in Riverside, California, where he had been living with the girlfriend McLeod had suspected he had there, and alerted the local police that they would be attempting to make the arrest.

He led them south from Riverside, down the Coachella Valley towards the Salton Sea, finally pulling off the main roads near the small farming town of Mecca, where he ran out of gas in a field 260 miles (420 km) from where the chase began.

[16] McLeod went to the police, and their searches turned up other evidence connecting Kimball to Kaysi's disappearance: the hat from her work uniform and her personal date book.

[16] Also found was a receipt for food from a supermarket in the northern Colorado town of Walden, dated the day after Kaysi had last been seen,[25] a weekend when Schlaff had recalled being unable to reach Kimball, who told him afterwards that he was scouting some terrain for a future hunting trip.

Kimball caused some disruption prior to his October 2009 sentencing when, through his lawyer, he circulated what appeared to be official FBI summaries of interviews with some of the other people he had been associated with.

Coet read a statement from Kimball after his cousin pleaded guilty to all four murders and was sentenced to 70 years, blaming the FBI for pushing him into a criminal world more dangerous than anything he had previously encountered without any guidance or support.

"It's hard to imagine we caught him on everything he did," declared Katharina Booth, one of the assistant DAs who prosecuted him, observing that his four victims were people on society's margins, who would not be quickly missed.

[3] In September 2010, it was reported that the bureau was investigating him as a possible suspect in the murder and mutilation of Catrina Powerll, a young woman who lived a troubled life similar to those of Kimball's other female victims.

[29] Three months later, Kimball told a cousin that he had been proposed as a suspect in the West Mesa murders in New Mexico, which were committed during the same period that he was living in the Denver area.

[3] Theodore Peyton, whose sexual abuse of the teenaged Kimball led to the suicide attempt that scarred his forehead and, according to Coet, permanently changed him for the worse, died in January 2017.

Coet argued that after Justin Kimball's suspicious 2004 head injury, Garnett's assistant DAs could have tried harder to find a second neurologist to examine the boy and determine whether his memory had been affected (in the years since, he had continued to recall the incident vividly).

Had another doctor been willing to vouch for the accuracy of Justin's recollections of the event, neighboring Adams County might have been able to develop a case and try Kimball for assault or attempted murder.

[8] Garnett agreed that that case, which his office and Adams County had both decided lacked sufficient evidence, could have turned out differently, but ultimately it introduced them to Kimball and made them take a closer look when the later frauds came to light.

Suthers' handling of the Kimball cases, by contrast, was part of a pattern of poor management when he had been U.S. Attorney, in charge of the small office of federal prosecutors in the state.