His father vanished after working for convicted murderer Sante Kimes. Decades later, he wants answers
Before socialite Sante Kimes' decades of crime and deception were uncovered, employee Elmer Holmgren vanished without a trace.
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.”
Elmer Holmgren.Courtesy Ken Holmgren 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.
Rating: 5