Chapter 2
It was nearly 1:00 A.M. and Elaine Phillips, Harbourtowne’s banquet manager, had just finished up for the night. After working a twelve-hour shift she was glad for some downtime, which she spent socializing with her aunt, Bonnie Parker, her cousin, Philip Parker, and his girlfriend, who were spending the weekend at the resort. Phillips and her family had just called it a night and were walking through the lobby when Kim entered and said she needed to speak to a Harbourtowne employee.
“A woman walked into the lobby. She had a cell phone up to her ear. It was turned upside down. She was just listening into it,” Phillips said later. “She walked over to us, my cousin and I, and she said, ‘I need to speak to someone who works here.’ My cousin, who was about a step ahead of me, kind of directed her to me. I asked her, ‘May I help you?’ And she said, ‘My room is on fire.’”
Phillips immediately asked Kim what her room number was, but Kim didn’t answer. So Phillips then asked her what her name was and Kim said Hricko. Remembering the spelling of Kim’s name, Phillips spelled it out for another Harbourtowne employee, who looked up the Hrickos’ record and shouted out that their room number was 506.
Phillips immediately called 911 to report the fire, while her cousin asked Kimberly if she was okay. The emergency operator told Elaine Phillips that the fire already had been called in.
As soon as she got off the phone, Phillips ran out of the lobby after her cousin, who was already on his way to the Hrickos’ room. When Parker got outside, he could smell smoke and started following his nose to the fire. As soon as Phillips caught up with him, she pointed him in the direction of room 506. When the pair arrived at the grouping of rooms that included 506, Parker couldn’t quite tell which room was on fire, so he started banging on the front doors of all the rooms. Then he went around to the back of the building, where he could see the smoke in the Hrickos’ room through the sliding glass door.
First Parker grabbed one side of the door and tried sliding it open. It wouldn’t budge. He noticed a chaise lounge on the deck and turned to ask his cousin if he should throw it through the glass door. Phillips told him to wait until she got a fire extinguisher in case the flames shot out of the room when he broke the glass. While Phillips went around front to get the fire extinguisher, Parker got down on his hands and knees on the rear deck and looked inside to see if there was anyone in the room. All he could see was the faint outline of someone’s feet. Parker jumped up and noticed that the other side of the sliding glass door was open slightly. Smoke was pouring out of the opening. Parker opened the sliding glass door all the way, crawled inside on his hands and knees, and made his way to the person in the room.
The smoke was so thick Parker could only see about a foot in front of him. When he finally got to Steve’s body, which was lying faceup on the floor in between the room’s two beds, he started beating him on his stomach, trying to wake him up. Steve didn’t wake up, so Parker decided the only way to help him was to get him out of the room. He tried grabbing Steve by his arms, but when he did, his hands just slid off. He couldn’t seem to get a good grip, so he tried dragging Steve out by his feet. Parker got Steve’s body to the edge of the sliding glass door, but couldn’t pull him over the raised threshold. Parker yelled for his cousin, who also grabbed Steve and helped pull his body out onto the deck. Once outside, Parker and Phillips saw that the upper part of Steve’s body was very badly burned. It was obvious to them that Steve was dead.
As soon as Parker got Steve out onto the deck, he remembered that his fiancée had been right behind him when he was running to the Hrickos’ room. He remembered when he was inside he could hear her yelling to him through the sliding glass doors. He didn’t want her to see Steve’s body, so he grabbed hold of her and tried to rush her around the corner of the villa. When the couple reached the side of the building, they saw Officer Patrick Sally and Officer Stephen Craig, St. Michaels police officers, getting out of their cars.
“As I arrived and got out of my vehicle, I observed two individuals, later identified as Philip Parker and Elaine Phillips, waving and yelling that there was a man down in the back,” Sally testified later.
Sally, Craig, and their sergeant raced around the corner to the back of the building. As they approached the back porch, they observed Steve lying there on his back with his left arm sticking straight up in the air. He was wearing a pair of light blue pajama bottoms that were pulled down, exposing his penis, and pulled up high on his shins. He was also wearing what appeared to be a white T-shirt, which had been burned. His chest and head were severely burned. It was obvious to the officers that Steve was dead. Sally checked Steve’s body temperature and found that it was elevated but not hot. His upper torso was stiff, either from the heat of the fire or from rigor mortis. His left arm was sticking straight up in the air and bent slightly backward. Sally attempted to take Steve’s pulse, but felt nothing.
Officer Sally now went inside room 506 to make sure no one else was inside and determined it was empty. As he looked around, he noticed that there was a lot of smoke damage to the room. He saw that the mattress closest to the bathroom was smoldering and completely burned, exposing the springs. The headboard was charred and the carpeting around the bed was melted and charred. As Sally was looking around the room, members of the St. Michaels Fire Department, as well as members of the Talbot County Sheriffs Department and the Maryland State Police, arrived and Sally apprised them of the situation. Sally then secured the perimeter of the villa and stayed there until 5:00 A.M.
While Sally was checking the room out, Officer Craig went around to the front of the building to help evacuate other guests and to speak with Philip Parker, who said he was the person who pulled Stephen Hricko out of the room and onto the deck. As Parker and Craig were talking, Kimberly approached Craig. She was holding her cell phone in her left hand. She kept saying she wanted “to see the body,” although she hadn’t yet been told that Steve was dead. Craig told her that the rescue squad was with him. He said Kim was at times hysterical and then despondent.
“She was very upset and could not stand without assistance,” Craig said.
Craig put her in his police car and tried to calm her down. Philip Parker told Craig that he could bring Kim to his room so police could talk to her. With the help of Philip Parker’s mother, Bonnie, Craig brought Kim to room 1016 in the main building. Once in the room, Kim asked Officer Craig to call Steve’s best friend, Mike Miller, which he did. Craig told Miller that the fire marshal would be coming to speak to Kim about the fire. After several minutes Kim went to lie down on one of the beds and fell asleep briefly. When she awoke after a few minutes, she again began to ask about her husband’s condition.
Also on the scene in the early-morning hours of February 15 was state police trooper Clay Hartness, who was assigned to the Easton Barracks. Hartness arrived at Harbourtowne around 1:30 A.M. and immediately went to the back of room 506, where he spoke with members of the St. Michaels Fire Department, who informed him of the death of Stephen Hricko. Hartness looked around and saw the badly burned man lying on the back porch with his head partially inside the open sliding glass doors. Hartness then went inside the room and surveyed the damage. After exiting the room, Hartness was met by Deputy Scott Kakabar, of the Talbot County Sheriffs Department, who initially contacted the state police. Kakabar brought Hartness up to speed on the investigation. Several hours later, the state police took over the investigation.
Hartness contacted Father Paul Jennings, the state police chaplain, and the two men went to room 1016 to notify Kim formally of her husband’s death. When they got there, they discovered that the Parkers were in room 1016 and Kimberly was in an adjoining room, standing near the glass windows at the far end of the room. Jennings introduced himself and Trooper Hartness and asked Kim to sit down on the edge of the bed so he could talk to her. When she was seated, Jennings knelt down in front of her so he could talk to her face-to-face. He told her Stephen was dead.
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I found her in an agitated state and apparently slightly intoxicated,” Hartness said. “Upon learning of her husband’s death, she exhibited little reaction beyond a few muffled sobs and moans.”
Jennings agreed that Kim showed very little emotion.
“Her response was not very emotional,” Jennings testified later. “I was kneeling and Trooper Hartness was standing next to her and then he asked her what happened and she proceeded to tell us her version of the story.”
Kim told Hartness that after leaving the murder-mystery production, she and Steve bought some beer from the bar and returned to their room. Once in the room Steve began pressuring her for sex, she said. When she refused, Steve became “pushy” and was “groping” her. She said she continued to resist Steve’s advances and then they started arguing. She told Hartness “I didn’t want to get into it, so I got my keys and my purse, got in the car, and left.” She said she drove to Easton looking for the home of some friends, but she said she wasn’t familiar with the area and never found the house. She said she couldn’t even find Route 50 and had to get directions back to St. Michaels. Kim told Hartness that when she got back to Harbourtowne, she realized she didn’t have her electronic key card to get back into her room.
She said she remembered that she and Steve had been using the sliding glass door and thought it might still be unlocked, so she went around to the back of the complex. Kim said she pushed the door open and was confronted by thick smoke. She said she screamed, pushed back the curtain, and felt around for the light switch, but couldn’t find it. She told the trooper she ran to the other rooms and knocked on the doors, screaming for help, but no one answered. Next she drove to the main building and went into the lobby, screaming that her room was on fire. She said several people who were in the lobby quickly ran to her room. She told Hartness she tried to go back to the room, but she was stopped by “someone in a uniform.”
While Hartness and Jennings were with Kimberly, Deputy Scott Kakabar arrived to speak with her. After listening to Kim’s version of the events leading up to Steve’s death, Kakabar called the Maryland State Police Criminal Investigation Division and the Maryland State Police Crime Laboratory.
Fire investigator Mike Mulligan, a bomb technician and a canine handler, was also called to the scene before the state police arrived to take over the case. Mulligan came to Harbourtowne, sometime after 2:00 A.M., with Bear, a black Lab, trained to detect explosives and accelerants at a fire scene.
Mulligan was called because the fire investigator in charge of the scene, Paul Schlotterbeck, was suspicious of the fire from the beginning. Schlotterbeck thought there was a possibility that the fire was set and that Steve had been murdered. That was the reason he called in the state police and the sheriff’s department, as well as Mulligan and Bear.
Schlotterbeck thought something just wasn’t quite right. And it had something to do with the way Kim conducted herself when the investigators initially talked to her. When Mulligan arrived at the scene about an hour after he was called, he conducted a test to make sure Bear was in the mood to go to work—and he was.
“What you do with a scent-detection dog is you put out a sample to see if they’re working,” Mulligan explained. “What I had was an eyedropper with evaporated gasoline in it and I put a drop out somewhere in the parking lot in front of the [building] and then I took the dog out of the car and took him for a little walk to see if he could detect any petroleum-based accelerants in the vicinity. And he gave me a hit where I put the drop of accelerant. The way he let me know that there was an accelerant present is he sat down and looked at me. He was on play reward, not food reward, which means I threw a little ball for him, and that was his reward for doing that work.”
Next Mulligan took Bear into Kim and Steve’s room. When he first entered the room, he stood for a minute in the foyer and noticed that there was a heavy deposit of soot in the room, and he knew that the room had been filled with a lot of smoke. He looked around and noticed that although the windows were black, they had not been burned by the fire.
“There wasn’t much flame damage to the room—not as much as I would normally see in the course of my work,” Mulligan said. “You usually find a room has burned further than this one. This fire smothered itself out because there was a [low level of oxygen] and therefore the fire damage was relatively minor.”
When Mulligan walked into the main room, which was approximately twenty feet by thirteen feet, he observed two double beds that were separated by a nightstand. The headboards were attached to the front wall. A wooden entertainment center with a television in it was located against the back wall and there was a masonry hearth in front of the first bed. There was a small metallic wood-burning stove sitting on the hearth. The doors to the stove were open and Mulligan could see the remains of a store-bought “easy light” log wrapper among the warm embers in the stove.
Past the hearth and wood-burning stove, along the back wall, was a sliding glass door that led to a covered wooden deck. In the corner, past the sliding door, was a padded chair. A heating unit/air conditioner was on the side wall behind the padded chair. There was a window with curtains on the side wall. There was also a desk located close to the heating unit.
When Bear first entered the room, he indicated he detected an accelerant on the sliding door. Mulligan later found out that when Parker dragged Steve out of the room, he left him near the sliding door for a short time before dragging the body out farther onto the back deck.
“I suspect that was what the dog was smelling,” Mulligan said.
Bear then detected some kind of petroleum-based accelerant at a spot in between the room’s two beds, which Mulligan later determined was the fire’s point of origin. However, because lab tests did not detect any accelerant—Mulligan said it probably evaporated—he was not able to testify at trial as to what the dog detected.
“Dogs are like people—they get up on the wrong side of the bed some days and they don’t want to work, so you have to go on the handler’s ability to read the dog—whether he’s working well, or not,” Mulligan said. “That day I think he was on the money—he had something there. Either I didn’t collect the evidence properly, or I didn’t recover enough of it so the lab could identify it, or it sat in the lab too long and it evaporated—but I think something was there. The dog’s ability to detect parts per million is more sensitive than some of the equipment they have in the lab.”
Mulligan explained that the minute a light accelerant—like the fluid in a cigarette lighter, or almost any type of petroleum-based accelerant, whether it’s gasoline, or diesel fuel, or kerosene—is exposed to the air, it starts to evaporate.
“The lighter it is, the faster it’s going to evaporate,” he said.
And once you put a match to it, that type of accelerant will burn up in the resulting fire.
Both Mulligan and the state police believed Kimberly staged the scene to make it look as if Steve, who was drinking heavily, she claimed, had been masturbating. When Steve was found, his pants were down slightly and his penis was exposed—and it looked like he accidentally had set himself on fire. And there was a copy of Playboy magazine next to him. They later theorized she got him in a compromising position by promising him sex, then injected him with a powerful muscle relaxant, succinylcholine chloride, which is rapidly processed by the body and therefore undetectable.
“I think his heart was still pumping, but the drug shut down the ability of the diaphragm to pump air in and out of his lungs,” Mulligan said. “The drug stops his ability to breathe when she shoots him up with it, but even though his lungs aren’t working, he had a certain amount of oxygen in his bloodstream, in his brain, so his heart is going to keep pumping. Just think how long you can hold your breath underwater—at least a minute or two. Steve could have known what was happening, but it depends on how soon she set him on fire after she injected him with the drug. If she waited four or five minutes before she lit him on fire, then there was a good chance he was unco
nscious before she sets him on fire. But if she gives him the shot, and as soon as he’s immobilized, she torches him up, [and] then she burns him alive, he’s conscious,” he said.
“My suspicion is she used something like that, like lighter fluid, and poured it on his face, and right around the pillow his head was on, to get the fire going,” Mulligan said. “I think it’s backed up by the way his shirt was burned. It seems to me she hated him—she just didn’t want to kill him, she wanted to embarrass him in death as much as she could. It fits—the head of his penis was pulled out above his pajama bottoms, like he was masturbating and the fact that she placed a Playboy next to him—it fits to me.”
In the Hrickos’ room Mulligan worked Bear around the far wall, up around the far bed and then in between the two beds, and when he came to what he later determined was the point of origin of the fire, Bear gave him a hit.
“It was a real hard show that he was detecting some kind of petroleum-based substance right there,” Mulligan said. “I gave him a reward and worked him through the rest of the room, as small as it was, but he didn’t give me more indications that there were accelerants there.”
When he was finished, Mulligan took Bear back outside and walked him around the parking lot and the dog again hit on the sample Mulligan had left out there originally—indicating that he was indeed working well. Mulligan then put Bear back in the car.
In the meantime the state police were beginning to show up and a couple of them went to interview Kim. At this point Schlotterbeck asked Mulligan to determine the fire’s point of origin, which he concluded was the spot between the two beds where the dog detected some kind of accelerant. Schlotterbeck also asked Mulligan to figure out what caused the fire.
“By that time our supervisor, Jake Kinhart, had arrived on the scene from his home in Salisbury, and with Jake’s help I did the origin-and-cause investigation of the room,” Mulligan said.
An Act Of Murder Page 3