A retired FBI agent has disclosed how a serial killer, who also served as a federal informant, manipulated the bureau while dispatching victims he provided information about.
Scott Kimball, 58, admitted to murdering four individuals between 2003 and 2004 and received a 70-year sentence in federal prison in Colorado in 2009. Former FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing believes the true count of his victims is likely much higher.
All the individuals he confessed to killing were part of a ‘game’ he was playing with the FBI, offering the agency fragments of information related to the murders he had committed.
‘He made a game out of tricking the FBI,’ Grusing told Fox News Digital. ‘As long as he won the game in front of him, that’s all that mattered.’
‘To have someone who enjoyed manipulating us, putting stuff in our files, and then making people disappear was beyond anything I’d seen,’ he said.
Kimball was a habitual fraudster who spent much of his formative years in and out of incarceration. By the 1990s, he had begun exploiting his con skills to manipulate the justice system, pinning his own crimes on fellow inmates.
This earned him a position as an informant for local police, and he would continue refining his fraudulent informant scheme over the next few years.
He was detained for check fraud in 2001 and struck up a friendship with his cellmate Steve Ennis, who faced drug charges. Kimball saw in Ennis a chance to advance his informant scheme and initiate collaboration with the FBI.
Scott Kimball pleaded guilty in 2009 to killing four people between 2003 and 2004
Before his murder conviction, Kimball had been in and out of prison for most of his life. This mugshot dates from 1988
Kimball persuaded Ennis that he had influential connections capable of ‘taking care of’ witnesses in Ennis’s case, thus resolving it. Concurrently, he was forming a relationship with Ennis’s girlfriend, a stripper named Jennifer Marcum.
After getting Ennis on board with his witness murder plan, Kimball reported it to the FBI and pinned the whole thing on Ennis. This earned Kimball confidential informant status, which led to him getting moved to a lower-security prison and eventually getting released.
Kimball had also convinced Ennis to hook him up with Marcum to get her out of stripping, according to former special agent Grusing.
Kimball’s manipulation not only earned him privileges from the FBI, but it also made Ennis look like the bad guy to Marcum and allowed Kimball to isolate her before eventually murdering her.
By 2003, just two years after his check fraud arrest, Kimball had become an official FBI informant and had long-since murdered Marcum.
Over the course of his time as an informant, he killed at least four people including Marcum.
The first of the other three victims was a woman named LeAnn Emry, another stripper who Kimball shot and left for dead in the desert just one month before murdering Marcum.
Another of his victims was Kayci Mcloed, whom he murdered in August 2023. Kimball confessed to her killing after he was arrested.
Kimball had been playing a ‘game’ with the FBI, offering the agency ‘breadcrumbs’ of information about murders he committed
The father of Jennifer Marcum, one of Kimball’s victims, held up a picture of another one of Kimball’s victims, LeAnn Emry, during a court hearing
He then murdered his own uncle, Terry Kimball, in 2004.
In each of these murders, Kimball served as an informant to the FBI, providing the agency with ‘breadcrumbs’ of information, including the damning fact that he was the last person seen with two of the victims.
Kimball eventually confessed to killing 21 people, and he had apparently told his lawyers that he had murdered even more – between 45 and 50 people – according to Grusing. None of those victims have been named.
It took years for the FBI to begin investigating Kimball. They began to do so in 2006 after pressure from the victims’ families.
Grusing said two fathers of the victims went to an FBI office to say that Kimball was responsible for Marcum’s disappearance as well as Mcloed’s. They emphasized that he was the last person to be seen with Mcloed as was reported in her case file.
Incredibly, Kimball himself had given the FBI that information, but they hadn’t considered him a suspect. Grusing said that Kimball had ‘mastered’ his manipulation of the agency and that he ‘enjoyed the game.’
‘It was like leaving little breadcrumbs to say, “I’m so good at this, I can tell you about these homicides, and you’ll never know I’m doing them,”‘ Grusing said.
Kimball was arrested on fraud related charges in California in 2006. While he was in prison, the FBI built a case against him and finally charged him with the murders he would plead guilty to in 2009.
After his conviction, Kimball continued stringing the FBI along for years as they tried to get him to tell them the whereabouts of his victims’ remains.
Grusing said at that point the FBI knew Kimball was continuing to manipulate them, but they had to keep playing his game because he was the only one who knew where the remains were.
‘Even though it was painful to be in front of him and let him win all the time, as long as he thought he was squirming, he would always talk. So that’s how I stayed with this man for 15 years,’ Grusing said.
The painful interrogations mostly paid off, as McLeod and Emry’s remains were recovered. Marcum’s remains were never found.
