John Suthers not only one to blame for botching serial killer Scott Kimball's case, author says
Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett's campaign against John Suthers for Colorado Attorney General is running ads arguing that Suthers let serial killer Scott Kimball remain free as an informant, while Garnett put him behind bars. Texas-based author Ed Coet, who's written a book inspired by Kimball, his second cousin, doesn't dispute that -- but he believes Garnett should be pointing the finger at others, too, including staffers at the Boulder District Attorney's Office.
Scott Kimball.
Coet's book, SLK -- Serial Killer, to be released by PublishAmerica in November, is a novel inspired by Kimball -- and he insists that it's no apologia. "It's not sympathetic toward Scott Kimball in any way, shape or form. He's a ruthless, evil serial murderer."
Nonetheless, Coet got to see another side of Kimball. "His mother, Barb, is my first cousin, but she's more like a sister to me than a cousin -- and when Scott was young, I was more like an uncle to him. But I mostly knew him as a kid. When I went away to the military" -- he served twenty years in the Army, many of them as a counter-intelligence officer -- "I would only see him at family gatherings when I came home on leave. But I didn't know anything about Scott's long criminal history at all, until he ended up in the news for being investigated as a serial murderer. My brother called me from Colorado to let me know, and I called Barb. She told me she was keeping it secret because she was so embarrassed."
To take readers inside Kimball's mind, Coet says he did a great deal of research into his activities, including events that went beyond the killings of which he's been convicted. He points to the book's eleventh chapter, entitled "Unthinkable," which "relates to Scott's attempt to kill his own son, and also to take a contract out on his own mother."
During the 2004 incident, Coet says, "Scott basically pushed a steel grate on his son, causing him severe brain damage, and then put him in a Jeep ostensibly to take him to the hospital -- but he then pushed his son out of the moving Jeep."
Kimball's son survived this ordeal, despite an extended stretch in a coma, and Coet says an assortment of local law enforcement agencies, including the Louisville Police Department and the Adam's County Sheriff's Office, opened an investigation. "They were going to bring Scott up on charges of attempted murder, but the surgeon who worked on Scott's son, who I identify by a pseudonym, thought he wouldn't make a good witness because of extensive brain damage.
"Well," he adds, "they made a mistake."
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