An Act Of Murder

by Linda Rosencrance

  Kim had been attending college, but really never took it seriously, so at that point she was working full-time with the intention of going back to school, but she never did, Maureen said.

  “She was quite the partyer,” Maureen said.

  Soon Maureen and Kim, who was also a waitress at the restaurant, started going out together after work.

  “We started spending a lot more time together,” Maureen said. “I was dating Michael at the time and she was just in one bad relationship after another—she’d fall madly in love with somebody and they’d just treat her like crap. I think it was probably because she was meeting them in the wrong places. She was kind of looking for a nice relationship, so we fixed her up with one of Mike’s friends, Steve Hricko.”

  Maureen and Mike figured that Steve and Kim would either really, really like each other, or really, really hate each other. They were complete opposites—Kim loved to party and socialize, Steve kept pretty much to himself. He wasn’t really very outgoing, nor was he someone who would walk into a room and light it up with his presence. People would notice him because of his size and stature, but he wasn’t the type of person who would make a grand entrance into a room. How their relationship fared depended on how much Kim really wanted to straighten her life out.

  “If she really wanted a serious relationship, then she was going to have to mature a little bit,” Maureen said.

  Steve and Kim started dating around the middle of 1988. They had been dating for four or five months when she got pregnant. Steve did the right thing and asked her to marry him. They decided to have their wedding in March 1989.

  “He was head over heels in love with her. There was no question about it, and she was in love with him,” Maureen recalled. “However, I think if the relationship was allowed to take its own course, I don’t know if he would have married her, only because at that time Kim was trying to mature. She was trying to straighten out her life and I don’t know whether or not that was something she was truly going to end up doing.”

  When Maureen found out that Kim and Steve were going to get married, she was just about finished making arrangements for her June marriage to Mike, so she told Kim she’d help her plan her wedding.

  “I had the thing planned from beginning to end in three days,” Maureen remembered. “I made all the phone calls—I did mostly everything by the phone.”

  Everything went off without a hitch, except for one small matter—Steve was deathly ill. The night of his wedding he was running a temperature of 103 or 104. He sweated bullets through the entire wedding, but he never let anybody know he was sick.

  Steve and Kim got married at the Eisenhower Chapel at Penn State. Mike was Steve’s best man and Maureen was Kim’s maid of honor. Maureen recalled a humorous moment during the ceremony.

  “Steve had forgotten the ring, so I ended up taking off my engagement ring and slipped that to him instead and he used that to put on her finger,” Maureen said. “It was kind of a funny thing.”

  The newlyweds had their reception at the Fire Hall in Boalsburg, a small town next to State College. The Hrickos didn’t really have much money in those days, so their honeymoon was an overnight stay at a local hotel.

  When they got married, Steve was working at Toftrees Resort & Four Star Golf Club, a golf course and conference center hotel complex, in State College. He worked there as an assistant superintendent and eventually became a golf-course superintendent at Iron Masters, a golf club near Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. Beginning on Memorial Day, 1991, Mike worked as an assistant superintendent at Medford Lakes Country Club in Medford Lakes, New Jersey. During the two-and-a-half years he worked there, Steve was working at Iron Masters.

  “Steve was very, very busy at work and there was a little bit of conflict between the two of them (Kim and Steve) before Sarah was born,” Maureen recalled. “They were getting the nursery ready and it seemed to be taking forever and Kim was a little frustrated with trying to get things done around the house.”

  Sarah was born in August 1989—the busiest time of year for a golf superintendent. At first Steve was very intimidated by his daughter’s size. She was so small and he was so big. He was very clumsy around her. Although he loved her very much, he just didn’t know what to do for her. It didn’t help that Sarah was an extremely fussy baby. Nevertheless, everything seemed to be going along just fine. When Steve got the job at Iron Masters, the Hrickos moved from State College to Hollidaysburg.

  At the time Maureen was working as a sales representative for Bell Atlantic and was very busy at work and Mike was going to school, so the two couples would only see each other occasionally. But Mike and Steve talked on the phone quite a bit. And Maureen would sometimes travel to Hollidaysburg to see Kim.

  “We didn’t talk to each other every day, or as much as we had when they lived in town. And I really missed them,” Maureen said.

  But things didn’t go well for Steve at Iron Masters. “He had a problem with some of the board members,” Mike said. “Some of the older members wanted one of the older guys who worked under Steve to be superintendent. They felt this older guy could do the job as well as, if not better than, Steve—and do it for less money. They were looking to bump Steve out, but the younger guys knew that Steve had an education and they knew that he had done a lot for the course. So there was a little rift there and I don’t remember if he was fired or stepped down, but he said enough is enough. He was tired of all the politics.”

  So the Hrickos moved back to State College and into an apartment in Steve’s parents’ house. For six months to a year, while Steve was looking for another job, he stayed home and took care of Sarah while Kim went to school to get her surgical technologist license. As Steve became more comfortable with his role as a full-time dad, the clumsiness he once felt taking care of Sarah completely melted away. He spent every moment with her, reading to her, playing with her, and just doing everything for her. Steve truly fell in love with the idea of being a dad. He was like a big burly teddy bear.

  “He was big and macho, but he even let Sarah put makeup on him,” Maureen said. “They’d play games and at one point he even said he could really get into being a full-time dad all the time.”

  But when Kim graduated from school, the Hrickos ended up leaving State College and moving to the Baltimore area, where Steve took a job as an assistant superintendent at Sparrows Point Country Club in Dundalk, Maryland. After the Hrickos moved, the Millers, who were living in New Jersey, started seeing less and less of Steve and Kim, but they would get together when they could. Steve and Mike, however, always stayed in touch.

  When Mike got a job at Harbourtowne as the golf-course superintendent and the Millers moved to Easton, they would sometimes spend the weekends with the Hrickos.

  “Kim and I stayed friends with the girl she roomed with in college—Rachel McCoy,” Maureen said. “Kim stayed in touch with Rachel because she was in the Baltimore area and had married a distant cousin of Kim’s. So they spent a lot of time with each other when Kim was living in Dundalk because they were both living and working in the Baltimore area. And they had become closer friends than Kim and I were at the time.”

  During this time Mike and Steve would get together occasionally to play golf while Maureen stayed at the Hrickos’ house visiting with Kim.

  “Everything seemed to be good in their marriage,” Mike said. “He never said at that time that there was anything different. But sometimes Kim would get a little perturbed with him when he would go out and stay out late, but we didn’t stay out that late. Steve was a homebody. He wasn’t one to go out and get liquored up and raise Cain, or anything like that. But he liked to go out and have an occasional beer with the guys, play a little golf, that kind of thing.”

  In June 1995 Steve got a job as the golf superintendent at Patuxent Greens and the Hrickos moved to Laurel, Maryland, where the course was located. Although Laurel was only about seventy minutes away from the Millers’ home in Easton, the couples rarely got togethe
r.

  “Our two kids and Sarah were getting older, and as we got more involved with our kids, we didn’t see them as much because Maureen and I were both working and it got a little more difficult to spend time with each other,” Mike said. “But Steve and I talked on the phone at least three or four times a week— he’d call me about something in the business, or he’d call me about whatever, and we’d talk from ten to fifteen minutes to an hour depending on what we were talking about.”

  Mike also would see Steve when he traveled to Baltimore to attend work-related seminars. And sometimes Steve would drive to Easton to play golf with Mike.

  “Kim wouldn’t always come along,” Mike said. “It got to a point where we weren’t seeing or hearing a lot from Kim. I remember Maureen saying she had tried to keep in touch with Kim, but Kim wasn’t returning her calls. So Maureen said if Kim didn’t want to keep in touch with her, she wasn’t going to keep wasting her time trying to get a hold of her. She’d call and leave messages and Kim wouldn’t call back.”

  Even though Kim was distancing herself from the Millers, Steve never gave Mike any indication that anything was wrong with his marriage.

  But in the winter of 1997, Mike discovered that the Hrickos were having some serious problems.

  “From my perspective it happened really fast,” Mike said. “I don’t think Steve even realized how bad things were until Kim asked him for a divorce. Around wintertime Steve called me and said Kim wanted a divorce. He was very upset. I don’t ever recall Steve being that upset, to the point of crying.”

  Part of the problem centered around the personality differences between Kim, who was a very outgoing woman, and Steve, a more introverted kind of guy.

  In her job as a surgical technologist, Kim became friends with a number of doctors and she would often invite these doctors home for dinner or drinks. But Steve didn’t like Kim’s work friends. He thought they were phonies.

  “He felt they kind of put on airs and having these people over just wasn’t his cup of tea,” Mike said. “Kim would get a little perturbed when she would invite these people over and Steve would say fine, invite them over, but he wasn’t going to say up all night and entertain them because he had to get up early—around four A.M.—to go to work. So when eight P.M. rolled around, Steve would get up and say he was going to bed and he’d go to bed.”

  As time went on, the relationship between Kim and Steve seemed to deteriorate even more. Maybe it was because Kim felt that Steve just wasn’t outgoing enough for her. But, even so, he was a great husband and father.

  “He’d go to work and bring home a paycheck,” Mike said. “He wasn’t out drinking. He was a family man. He loved Sarah.”

  Although Mike and Steve continued to keep in touch, Kim and Maureen drifted apart.

  “Closer to when this [was] happening, I hadn’t talked to her for a very long time,” Maureen recalled. “She wasn’t coming down with Steve anymore to visit and she wasn’t really calling much anymore. It was almost like she was really distancing herself. I think what ended up happening is they started having trouble in the marriage, and she, knowing that Steve and Mike were so close, was very limited in what she was sharing with me, knowing it would probably get back to Steve.”

  Then one day in November 1997, out of the blue, Kim called the Millers and told Maureen she wanted to come to Easton for a visit. Maureen thought that was odd because she had asked Kim to visit on several occasions, but she always turned her down. But Maureen was happy that Kim wanted to come to Easton.

  “Mike was going to be out of town. He was going home to State College for a turf-grass meeting and he always took the kids with him. I was going to have the house to myself, so I made plans with Kim,” Maureen said.

  Several days before she was supposed to arrive, Kim called to tell Maureen that they would be going out with a bunch of her friends because it was a bachelorette party for her friend Jenny, who had grown up in Easton. Maureen soon figured out the real reason Kim contacted her was because she needed a place for all her friends to stay while they were in Easton.

  “So they came down for the bachelorette party and that was my first meeting with Brad Winkler,” Maureen said. “Brad came down with Kim and his cousin’s fiancée, Jennifer—it was her bachelorette party.”

  Maureen had a previous engagement and caught up with the group at a local watering hole around 11:00 P.M.

  “Everybody was completely sloshed and most of the people at the party had already left, except Kim, Brad, Jennifer, and a couple of [other people],” Maureen said. “We stayed until one or one-thirty in the morning and visited and then we went back to my house. We played football outside for awhile and then everybody went to bed and in the morning they got up and left.”

  Before Kim left that morning, she and Maureen were sitting around the kitchen table catching up.

  “You have the perfect life,” Kim said.

  “Why do you say that?” Maureen asked, a bit taken aback by her friend’s remark.

  “Because you have the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect husband.”

  “Honey, are you forgetting you and I work almost in the same business—you’re a surgical tech, and I’m a drug rep. Our houses are pretty much the same thing and our husbands are pretty much duplicates of each other,” Maureen said. “So why is my life so different from yours?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Kim responded.

  Maureen couldn’t figure out why Kim was saying those things because she had never before compared their lives. Although Maureen thought Kim’s comments were a bit strange, she just put them out of her head.

  In January the news that Kim had asked Steve for a divorce completely blindsided Maureen, because Kim had never even told Maureen her marriage was in trouble the last time they were together.

  But Maureen began putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

  “The whole time we were out with Brad at the bachelorette party, he was talking to people about his failed marriage—he had only been married six months and his wife fooled around on him and broke his heart,” Maureen recalled. “And Kim was talking about Brad—not just telling me his story, but going on and on about his story and how if she was only ten years younger . . . and I told her she seemed to be forgetting that she was married.”

  At the party Kim couldn’t seem to stop talking about Brad. She kept telling Maureen that he was the sweetest guy she had ever met. But Maureen hadn’t put two and two together.

  “He wasn’t a man I would look twice at. I have no idea what she saw in him, but I think she was totally attracted to his personality,” Maureen said. “He really was a nice guy, caring and genuine.”

  Around the end of 1997 Kim asked Steve for a divorce. He was devastated. Steve called Mike in January 1998 to tell him Kim had asked for a divorce and he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to lose his wife and daughter. They were everything to him. Steve told Mike he’d do anything to keep his marriage together, including going to counseling.

  “I told him early on Maureen and I had gone to counseling and I said it’s not that big of a deal. You go to counseling and talk things out and it can’t hurt,” Mike remembered.

  Mike went to Laurel in January to visit Steve. The friends sat and talked about everything, except Kim and their marriage.

  “It seemed like old times. Steve didn’t seem upset and he never really brought up the problems in the marriage. It kind of didn’t occur to me that he had just called me and said Kim wanted a divorce. I didn’t want to pry, either, but it was odd thinking back on it,” Mike said. “Then Kim came back from bringing Sarah home from soccer and she came downstairs and sat on the couch next to Steve. I was on another couch in the corner and Steve was talking and Kim was sitting on the couch next to him. Steve had his arms on the back of the couch and she was kind of nestled in next to him with her hand on his knee. I didn’t think anything of it, but after the murder happened, I thought how odd it was that he was all upset about her
wanting a divorce and she came in and sat next to him like everything was peachy keen. I think at that time he told me, in his opinion, things were better.”

  Steve really did think his marriage was on the right track again. He and Kim were going to counseling together and they were each seeing a counselor one-on-one. In addition, Steve was taking medication for depression. Mike said he never thought his friend was that depressed, although he admitted Steve was under a lot of pressure at work.

  “In his situation as a golf-course superintendent, the owners didn’t have a lot of money, but they wanted top-rate conditions,” Mike said. “But there’s only so much you can do without money. So he was working a lot of hours and he was under a lot of stress. I don’t know if that had anything to do with making him depressed, but I know he was looking to better himself and get out of that situation and make the situation better for his family.”

  Sometime between the middle of January and the end of that month, Steve called Mike to ask if he had any ideas for romantic things to do for Valentine’s Day. Steve told Mike he had talked to the counselor regarding doing something with Kim and the counselor said it was up to Kim to decide if she wanted to do anything.

  Mike told Steve about the Valentine’s Day weekend getaway at Harbourtowne, which included a murder-mystery dinner-theater production. Steve thought that sounded like a good idea and he set the weekend up.

  “Steve talked to Kim’s friends about it—I think he told her he was planning this little getaway, but I don’t think he told her where it was, because he didn’t want to upset her if she didn’t want to do it. I think one of her friends told her where they were going,” Mike said. “But she gave him the impression that she was cool with it. Maureen and I offered to watch Sarah for them, but Kim said no, which thinking back on it was odd. As close friends as we were, all they would have to do was zip down to our house in Easton, drop Sarah off, and then go out to the resort. But she didn’t want to do that. She was either going to leave Sarah with a friend in Laurel, or her mother would travel to Laurel to watch her.”