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Police suspect the Kimeses may have been trying to relieve Silverman of her multimillion-dollar home. A notary public has come forward to say that Kenneth Kimes and an unidentified woman called him to the mansion to notarize a document that already bore a signature reading "Irene Silverman." When he asked the woman to sign another piece of paper so he could check her signature, she hesitated and he left. When they were arrested, the Kimeses reportedly had Silverman's passport and financial documents with them.
So far, there is no trace of Silverman. But knowing the Kimeses' record, police fear the worst. They have used bloodhounds in Silverman's town house and nearby Central Park to try to sniff out her trail. And they are pursuing leads that she may have been killed and dumped in the grassy medians along New Jersey's Garden State Parkway, where the Kimeses are believed to have driven the afternoon Silverman vanished.
Film-noir fans quickly spotted the similarities between the Kimeses and the mother-and-son team of con artists in The Grifters, the 1990 movie starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack. But any reader of dime-store detective novels knows that true grifters take their haul by trickery, not violence. When the police investigation is over, the Kimeses may be known by a less exotic word in the criminal lexicon: murderers.