Kimball would make a living as a hunting guide, and dabbled in numerous non-violent crimes.
In 1988 he scored his first felony for writing bad checks in Montana,
then later that year he was arrested once more for passing yet another bad
check and for breaking and entering into two separate homes and stealing several firearms.
Kimball managed to avoid jail time and moved with his second wife to Spokane,
Washington where he could start a new life... of crime. Getting into the lumber business,
he began to scam timber companies. Almost as if he couldn't even help himself,
Kimball also stole money from his wife's dentist and the church they attended. In 1997,
the couple divorced, and two years later Kimball kidnapped his wife- though charges
were never filed because the two had continued a sexual relationship even after their split.
Kimball's laundry list of crimes were finally catching up though, and in 2000, he finally landed
prison time. After passing three more forged checks, a court revoked his suspended sentence
from his 1988 sentencing, landing him in prison for about a year. After his sentence he was moved
to a pre-release prison center in Helena, Montana, where he was allowed to work as a cashier at a gas
station. Inevitably, Kimball ended up stealing $671 from the gas station along with a truck.
Kimball fled north, going up to Alaska and living under his brother's name.
There he met Catherine Curtiss, the woman who would become his third wife
and who never knew him as anyone other but Brett Kimball. However,
soon Kimball found himself in need of cash, and he bought himself blank check stock and a computer,
with which he could print checks in his brother's name, forging almost $25,000 in bad checks.
Eventually the authorities once more caught up with him and threw him in an anchorage prison.
Kimball knew that with all his old warrants surfacing now that his identity had been revealed,
he'd need to make himself valuable somehow if he was going to be a free man anytime soon. That's
when he turned to the FBI, and sold them a story they bought hook, line, and sinker.
Kimball may have been a monster, but he was charismatic and had a knack as a confidence man.
He warned the FBI that his cellmate was plotting to kill a federal judge,
federal prosecutor, and two witnesses. He also told them that he could provide information
about the October 2001 assassination of a federal prosecutor in Seattle.
Given his non-violent white-collar crimes, the FBI bought his stories and discarded his warrants,
moving him from his prison in Anchorage, Alaska, to FCI-Englewood in Colorado. Six months later he
was released, officially an informant for the FBI. Of course, Kimball had no actual intelligence to
provide for the FBI, so he fed them a continuous line of exaggerations and useless information- to
this day not a single arrest or warrant has ever stemmed from Kimball's service as an informant.
Kimball however took right back to his old ways, right under the FBI's nose.
He began cashing bad checks again, but soon took on the biggest score of his life.
He had started a legitimate business buying and selling organic beef, and
took to financing that business with bad checks. Getting greedy would lead to his downfall though.
Impersonating Cleve Armstrong, a local optometrist, Kimball wrote more than $83,000
in bad checks- to his own companies. Kimbal had gained access to the necessary info thanks to
his mother, who ran an insurance company in the same building as Armstrong. Kimball had set up a
small office for himself in the basement of the building, right next to a poorly secured closet
that kept many of Armstrong's financial records. Breaking in and stealing the necessary info let
Kimball impersonate Armstrong over the phone to his bank, making the payments without detection.
As the police began to look for Kimball though, he'd already fled the state.
The FBI pulled their protection of Kimball after an internal review found that Kimball had provided
no good intelligence to date. The officer who had recruited him and overseen his short career
as an informant was immediately re-assigned- probably to a listening post in the Arctic
circle somewhere. To this day though the FBI refuses to comment on the situation,
likely to avoid even more public embarrassment.
Kimball's marriage eventually imploded, and he took up with a 25 year old waitress. She would
later remark that while he acted like a gentleman at all times, he was prone to rough sex, bondage,
and taking photos of her. Eventually he pressured her to buy him a rifle, as he was not allowed to
due to his status as a felon. Upon receiving the rifle, Kimball disappeared once more.
With the FBI now issuing a warrant for his arrest and cooperating with local law enforcement across
several states, a disturbing picture of Kimball's activities in the last few years began to merge.
Sometime towards the end of 2002, Kimball had reached out to LeAnn Emry,
the girlfriend of an inmate he had served time with- and turned in to authorities as the
mastermind of an escape plan he had actually engineered himself. As part of the plan,
his cellmate had told him to make contact with Emry once he was out of the prison
in case he wasn't able to, and Emry was also told to listen to Kimball and do as he said.
Kimball contacted Emry and drew her into his scams, the two stealing mail from local
post offices to forge checks. On January 16th, 2003, Emry told her parents that she was going
on a trip to Mexico to go caving. Her parents hoped that this was a sign that she was taking
some time off and getting a grip on her out of control life- instead she'd end up losing it.
Emry and Kimball went on a road trip, stealing checks worth $15,000.
Kimball also made sure that their gas and expenses were paid on Emry's credit card,
as well as a laptop and a handgun. Kimball would use that handgun to
shoot Emry in the head shortly after, leaving her body in a box canyon in Utah.
Kimball would also go on to kill the girlfriend of another cell mate, Jennifer Marcum. Marcum was a
25 year old single mother and high-school dropout working as a stripper. Kimball had told Marcum
that he had opened up a chain of coffee shops and had an opening for her in Seattle. In preparation
for the move, Marcum moved her belongings to Kimball's home- she'd never be seen again.
Marcum's car was discovered at the Denver airport, though there was no evidence she
had ever boarded a flight. On the insistence of her father, the police opened an investigation
into Marcum's disappearance, and through a contact at the FBI, he was able to get a meeting with an
informant who had news on the murder, and went by the alias “Joe Snitch”. The informant said that
Jennifer was dead and knew where the body was buried- which made Marcums' father believe that
this informant had actually killed Marcum himself. The FBI didn't believe him, until “Joe” offered to
show Marcum's mother exactly what had happened to her daughter- or a sex escort if she paid for one.
At a meeting, Marcum's father had managed to write down “Joe's” license plate number and
had a police friend run the plates- revealing that the informant was none other than Kimball himself.
Kimball however had already struck close to home.
In 2003, he had met single mother Lor McLeod, and now lived with his new girlfriend and her 19 year
old daughter Kaysi Dawn McLeod. One day Kimball presented a bag of drugs to Kaysi's mother,
claiming to have found them in her room. In a confrontation with her mother,
Kaysi grew angry after denying the drugs were hers and left the house.
Kimball got Kaysi a hotel room where she could stay, and came by to pick her up and drive her
to work. He reassured Kaysi's mother that she just needed some time to cool off, but then
Kaysi went missing. One day she didn't show up at the hotel room she was sharing with her boyfriend,
and she had never shown up to work. Kimball claimed to have been on a hunting trip that day,
and conveniently left on a work trip for a whole week right as Kaysi went missing.
Kimball had already murdered Kaysi though, burying her remains in a national park.
Kaysi wouldn't be the only family member Kimball would kill though.
Soon after Kaysi's disappearance, Kimball's uncle,
Terry, had the good fortune of winning the lottery and promptly retired to Mexico. There
was just one problem- the Ohio State lottery had no record of Terry winning. What was known
is that Kimball had immediately begun to sell Terry's items shortly after he went missing.
In 2008 Kimball was finally jailed for check fraud, and was the prime suspect in at least
four disappearances. Authorities grilled him, but Kimball refused to confess to any murders-
though he dropped an enigmatic clue which stuck in one of the investigator's minds,
asking what if one of the girls had simply disappeared in a national forest?
Presumably seeking to offer a plausible explanation for Kaysi's disappearance that
didn't involve him, Kimball had inadvertently offered the clue that would bring him down.
Investigator Jonathan Grusing happened to remember a receipt that had been sitting in evidence after
Kimball's arrest. The receipt placed Kimball at a grocery store very near the Routt National Forest
on the day after Kaysi disappeared. Contacting park staff, they confirmed that a skull had
been found in the fall of 2007- subsequent DNA testing proved that it belonged to Kaysi McLeod.
Perhaps most disturbing of all though is the fact that Kimball had taken Kaysi's mother
on their official honeymoon to that same forest,
just a few days after he had killed and buried her not far from where they made camp.
With that discovery, the pressure ramped up on Kimball. He resisted at first,
but eventually caved, helping lead investigators to the remains of two of his other victims.
A third however couldn't be found, but he admitted to the murder.
Despite this, Kimball is suspected in the murders of several other individuals-
including the attempted murder of his own son, covered up as a serious car accident.
His son just happened to have a life insurance policy made out to Kimball himself.
Today Kimball rots in a prison in Florida, where he'll never see another day as a free man.
The FBI meanwhile continues to do its best to sweep under the
rug the several years that they unknowingly protected a serial killer as an informant.
Now go check out 13 serial killers you’ve definitely never heard of,
or click this other video instead- unless you fancy a trip to a national park.