Nearly 20 years after police began investigating the disappearance of four people linked to Scott Kimball, an FBI informant and Colorado serial killer, his sons break their silence in an interview on ABC's 20/20.
Kimball's sons, Justin and Cody, who were only children at the time of their father's murders, reveal for the first time the details surrounding what they claim was their father's attempt to kill Justin when he was 10 years old.
Scott Lee Kimball Colorado Department of Corrections
"I remember thinking, 'This guy is going to kill me and obviously he's going to make it look like an accident. Nobody is going to find out because I'm going to be dead,'" Justin, now 29, says in the interview.
One afternoon in July 2004, Scott Kimball and his two sons were in the backyard digging holes and chasing mice. Justin said that when Cody entered the house, his father told him to dig a hole in a specific place while still looking at the horizon.
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"I seemed to see a lot of stars, flashes in front of my face, and then came the big impact. I heard him beating me," she explains.
A large metal grid of cattle had fallen on his head. On the way to the hospital, Justin claims his father tried to kill him again by throwing him out of a moving car.
"I remember him pushing me by the face, because I remember how big his hand was and how hot it felt on my cold face," she says.
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According to a police report, Scott Kimball told officers he was inside when Justin was playing near the grate; He peeked out and saw that he had fallen on top of his son. Kimball also told police he was trying to pull Justin back into the car, not push him out on the way to the hospital.
"At this time we have no reason to believe this was criminal activity," the police report states.
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Justin suffered severe brain damage and went into an induced coma, but miraculously survived. His first words upon regaining consciousness shocked family members who accompanied him.
"I remember saying, 'It was my father.' My last thought before I lost consciousness was, 'No one is ever going to know that he tried to do this to me,'" Justin explains in the interview.
According to authorities, Justin had a life insurance policy worth $50,000. Just days before the incident, Scott became the sole beneficiary.
Justin's mother, Larissa, who was already divorced from Kimball, explains when asked how she felt when she learned that the man had changed the policy: "To be honest, I think I threw up, because then it all started..."
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Who is Scott Kimball?
Two years later, in 2006, detectives in Lafayette, Colorado, began investigating Scott Kimball for check fraud. He was arrested after a dramatic police chase in California and charged with habitual crime for prior nonviolent offenses such as forgery, theft and fraud.
However, detectives suspected Kimball was involved in much more than financial crimes, after it came to light that he was the last person seen with two missing women in 2003: Kaysi McLeod and Jennifer Marcum.
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In 2003, Kimball convinced the FBI to use him as an informant to prevent a murder. He had previously been an informant for the federal bureau in Alaska and Seattle, where authorities believed he had been instrumental in preventing the murder of a federal judge and prosecutor.
Kimball's web of lies and manipulations finally unraveled in 2006, when both parents of those missing women went to the FBI.
Rob McLeod, Kaysi McLeod's father, had contacted Bob Marcum after reading a newspaper article about the disappearance of his daughter, Jennifer Marcum, which mentioned Scott Kimball as the last person to see her alive.
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"Rob McLeod and Bob Marcum [...] They entered the FBI office in November 2006. Both Rob and Bob tell my boss that Scott Kimball took his daughters," former Special Agent Johnny Grusing told ABC News.
Scott Kimball was also related to two other missing persons: his own uncle, Terry Kimball; and LeAnn Emry, the ex-girlfriend of one of Kimball's former cellmates.
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"Nobody saw a global picture of who Scott Kimball was. It wasn't until we started looking at his criminal history and reconstructing it that we realized that each of the agencies had no idea what he was really up against," said Gary Thatcher, chief investigator for the Boulder County District Attorney's Office, which was investigating Kimball for check fraud.
Investigators already knew that Kimball had said he had been hunting the day Kaysi McLeod disappeared. While executing a search warrant for Kimball's belongings, Grusing had found a receipt from a grocery store in Walden, Colorado, which is surrounded by a national forest.
Grusing called the Forest Service and learned that a hunter had recently found a skull in the soil of the area.
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"Based on what Scott had told me, the receipt and the desolate place where the hiker had been found, I was certain it was Kaysi," says Grusing.
Grusing was right, and the confirmation was a turning point in the investigation. Now that investigators had recovered Kaysi McLeod's remains, they negotiated a deal with Kimball, who agreed to take them to the bodies of Jennifer Marcum, Terry Kimball and LeAnn Emry in exchange for reduced charges.
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The information provided by Kimball led investigators to the bodies of LeAnn Emry, in Book Cliffs, Utah, and her uncle Terry Kimball, near Vail, Colorado. However, Jennifer Marcum was never found. As a result, his plea agreement was renegotiated.
In October 2009, Scott Kimball was sentenced to 70 years in prison after pleading guilty to all four murders.
With information from ABC News, The Denver Post and The Associated Press