The phone call was chilling.
Ken Holmgren did not talk to his father often, but during that February 1991 call, Elmer Holmgren told his son that if he did not have his news again in a few days, he should call an agent with the ATF, the federal agency . Now known as the alcohol, tobacco office, firearms and explosives.
“Panic hit,” said Ken Holmgren, 71, to “Datelline.” “I really didn’t know who I was working for.”
He said he knew that his father, a lawyer who had fought to find work after the death of his employer in Florida, had moved to Las Vegas and was working for a rich couple, Kenneth and Sante Kimes.
But Ken Holmgren did not know about Sante’s long criminal record, mainly due to charges related to robbery, he said. Nor did she know that she had recently turned three years in a federal prison for contracting positions. She and her husband, who took a guilt in the case, had been accused of abusing young undocumented women who had recruited to work as housewives.
Holmgren never heard from his father again. But less than a decade later, Sante Kimes captured national attention with a couple of brutal and disconcerting crimes that covered thousands of miles. Sante Kimes and his youngest son, Kenny Kimes Jr., were accused and convicted of separate judgments in relation to two 1998 murder plots, the murder of a socialité from New York City, Irene Silverman, and the fatal shooting From a Los Angeles businessman, David David, David. Kazdin
During his trial for the murder of Kazdin, the son confessed a third murder, the murder of a bank executive who had disappeared in the Bahamas in 1996 while investigating irregularities in the bank accounts on the high seas of Kimes.
Now, decades later, the mystery of what happened to Elmer remains. Like his son’s frustration that, in his opinion, the authorities never seemed to have sought answers in the disappearance. Holmgren said that she is even more crazy since when she disappeared, her father was cooperating with the ATF as a witness against Sante Kimes and her husband in an alleged fire caused at her home in Honolulu, an agreement that Holmgren said she later learned of a special of a special. Agent with the ATF.
“If ATF had done its job, there would have been several other people who would not have lost their lives,” he said. “That is the way I see it.”

An ATF spokesman would not comment. The person Holmgren identified as the special agent who provided information about his father’s role in fire and his apparent cooperation with the office He withdrew from ATF and did not return a message in search of comments.
In response to a request for public records of “Dateline” for documents linked to the alleged fire caused in Honolulu, as well as another fire caused on a property of Las Vegas that belonged to the Kimes, the Office Matrix Agency, the Department of Justice , provided a management registration last autumn. The document said that all evidence except one had been destroyed in the attacks of September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center, where federal offices were located.
In 2003, most of that remaining evidence was returned to representatives of Sante and Kenny Kimes Jr., according to the registration. The office would only provide copies of a photo album whose property was not clear, according to the registration.
Sante Kimes died in 2014 in a New York prison at 79. Kenneth Kimes Mr. died in 1994. The couple was never accused of crimes in relation to the alleged fire. An ATF spokesman would not comment. The police reports obtained through a request for public records of the Honolulu Police Department, which also investigated the fire and describe the fire as a cause caused, does not provide an explanation of the result of the case.
Kenny Kimes Jr., 49, was a teenager at the time of the fire and is not suspected in Elmer’s disappearance. He is complying with a lifetime without probation in a state prison in California.
Living high life
The fire exploded around 1 in the morning of September 16, 1990, in the house in front of the Kimes Sea ‘southeast of Honolulu. The video of the time showed the house completely wrapped in flames.

It was not the only home that belonged to the Kimes. Kenneth Kimes Mr. had made his fortune in real estate, and the family had multiple properties in Hawaii, as well as in Las Vegas and a property in front of the sea in the Bahamas, said Kent Walker, eldest son of Sante Kimes of a previous marriage.
“Our lives were beyond the American dream,” Walker told “Dateline.”
Honolulu’s fire investigators determined that the fire had multiple points of origin: the main bedroom, the dining room, the living room, and described their cause as a fire, indicating that it was established intentionally, according to the case file of the department Honolulu Police on the fire.
A monitoring report included in the file, which was obtained through a request for public records, described a recent legal dispute on the sale of the property: after a buyer in Colorado paid $ 1.7 million for the previous year, the Money was placed in the warehouse. But a person whose name was drafted in the document “breached in the agreement that gives several excuses not to sell,” according to the report, who quoted a buyer representative.
The property had a retention right of $ 900,000, said the representative, and a trial on the dispute was scheduled for January 21, 1991, four months after the house was burned.
According to an incident report included in the record request, it is described that a person whose name was written in the document has hired a suspect to burn his home. (The name of the suspect is also written). The owner then filed an insurance claim for $ 1.4 million, according to the report.
Disappeared while I was in protective custody
A few months after the fire, said Holmgren, received the first of his father’s two phone calls. In the first conversation, Holmgren recalled, his father told him that he was working for the Kimes and seemed reluctant to be on the phone.
“I have to shorten this,” he reminded his father saying.
A few weeks later, in early February, Elmer called again and provided his son the names of two ATF agents in Honolulu, said Ken Holmgren, who at that time lived in Florida and worked as a contractor for an electric company.
If Elmer did not return to him in three days, Ken Holmgren remembers him saying, his father told him to call the office.
“It was very stressful,” said Ken Holmgren.
A few days later, when Holmgren had not had news from his father, he scored one of the agents while he was at work and left a message.
Shortly after, said Holmgren, two loads of ATF agents appeared in their work. The person who took the message had confused him, he said, and believed that Holmgren It was actually his father.
“My boss was a bit baffled, but it was very understanding,” said Holmgren.
Initially, he said, the ATF agent offered few details about his father’s link with the office. Elmer was supposed to have been in protective custody, he remembered the agent saying, but “they lost his notion.” (A agency spokesman said that ATF places people in protective custody with the United States sheriff service when there is a perceived or known threat to the safety of a person).
A couple of months later, said Holmgren, the agent offered more details: his father had been involved in the alleged fire caused in the property of Kimes’ Honolulu, a fact that Elmer revealed to a friend in a bar. That friend then shared that information with the authorities, Holmgren said the agent told him.