Chapter 6
Kim and Maureen made all the funeral arrangements and purchased a cemetery plot on Tuesday, but the fighting with the Hrickos over the disposition of Steve’s body continued. They insisted they didn’t want him cremated—according to their religion, he wouldn’t be able to be buried in consecrated ground then.
“It was a nasty scene,” Maureen said. “The Hrickos were upset, understandably so, and they were fighting tooth and nail on every decision Kim made because it went against their faith. But Kim didn’t care and kept saying that was the way it was going to be. And now we all know why she was doing it. And there I was thinking she was telling me the truth.”
While Kim and Maureen were making arrangements with the funeral director, something else happened that Maureen thought was a bit odd.
“We had to talk about how we were going to pay for this thing, and after I had talked to the funeral director, I told Kim that it was going to be expensive and asked her how she was going to pay for it,” Maureen recalled. “I asked her if she had life insurance on Steve and she said there was a life insurance policy. I asked her if she knew where it was, because I don’t know where our policies are, and she said it was in the dining room.”
Maureen asked Kim what it was doing there and Kim told her it was sitting in a cardboard box in the corner of the room. Kim explained that she had taken it out for some reason a couple of weeks earlier and hadn’t had time to put it back yet. So Maureen went into the dining room, located the box, and opened it.
“The life insurance policy was laying on top of all the paperwork,” Maureen said. “And I’m thinking this is the weirdest thing—that she would know right off where the policy was. That was one of the other red flags that went off.”
After spending two days with Kim, Maureen finally told her that she needed to get home to her husband. She told the Hrickos she was going to send Kim to State College and they could continue to fight over the funeral arrangements when she got there.
So on Tuesday, Maureen sent Kim, her mother, and Sarah to State College to stay with the Hrickos; then she went home. Once there, Maureen asked Mike what he knew about the events leading up to Steve’s death. Mike told Maureen what he had learned from police and others at Harbourtowne.
“He said Kim told police that they had gone to the dinner theater, where they drank beer and wine. Kim told police Steve had taken his antidepressants, as well as some muscle relaxant, because his back was bothering him. When they got back to their room, they got in a fight and Kim stormed off and Steve lit a cigar and had fallen asleep,” Maureen said. “Mike said they had found a Playboy next to him. So we figured that he and Kim argued because he had taken a Playboy with him to Harbourtowne.”
The Millers speculated the Playboy was the cause of Kim and Steve’s argument because they knew how much Kim hated pornography.
“When they were living in Hollidaysburg, Kim ran across a collection of Playboy magazines Steve had from when he was a teenager, probably from his father. They were very old—probably collectibles. Well, she came across them in the bottom of a closet in their house in Hollidaysburg and she flipped out,” Maureen remembered. “We happened to be visiting that weekend and she was still very upset about it. And she discussed the argument over the Playboys with me. Kim had a very religious upbringing and she abhorred pornography and thought it was absolutely abhorrent that any man would possess it. And what did that make her feel like if he was going and looking at the big, bodacious women in the magazine and then coming and making love to her? It was so insulting to her that she told him that if she ever, ever saw a Playboy in their house again, their marriage was over.”
So when Mike told Maureen that there was a Playboy found near Steve, another red flag went up. Maureen started thinking that something was wrong because it just seemed too obvious that there was a Playboy in the Hrickos’ room.
“I knew that Steve would never, in a million years, have taken a Playboy on his romantic getaway weekend to save his marriage,” Maureen said. “I knew about how she felt about it and I knew the ultimatum that she had given him.”
That was the first time Maureen started thinking that something just wasn’t right. But she decided to take the advice she had given to her husband—stop trying to make sense out of nonsense.
While the Millers were packing and getting ready to head to State College on Wednesday, Maureen called the Hrickos to see how things were going and to check on Kim. Maureen was shocked to hear that Kim was nowhere to be found. The Hrickos told Maureen that the last they had heard, Kim and her best friend, Rachelle St. Phard, were planning to go back down to St. Michaels and Harbourtowne because Kim said she needed to be with Steve. Maureen told the Hrickos that Kim should stay away because the media were swarming all over Harbourtowne.
“But they said, ‘She’s on her way and you can’t stop her, we tried,’” Maureen said.
In the meantime Kim called Maureen, who quickly told her not to go to the resort. But Kim was determined and insisted that she was going, no matter what. Maureen told Kim she was going to call her husband at work at Harbourtowne and she’d call Kim back. Maureen explained to Mike that Kim was dead set on going to St. Michaels.
“Mike said to tell her to go to the maintenance shop and he’d keep her there until it got dark and then he’d take her down to the water,” Maureen said.
Kim agreed and she and Rachelle drove to Harbourtowne to meet Mike.
Rachelle St. Phard met Kim Aungst when she was in ninth grade and Kim was in tenth grade.
“I ended up at the school she was attending, Calvary Baptist Christian Academy in Altoona, Pennsylvania,” Rachelle said. “I knew her vaguely, but we really weren’t friends until we went bowling one night and we kind of started playing jokes on one another. That was the beginning of our friendship—we really just clicked. We’d spend nights in one another’s houses. We played basketball and soccer and softball and we were cheerleaders. Her parents were divorced when I met her. She was pretty young, around four, when they got divorced. She lived with her mom and stepfather. Her last name was Aungst—her dad’s name. He lived about fifteen or twenty minutes from Hollidaysburg, where she lived. I lived in Altoona, about fifteen or twenty minutes away. She had one brother, a half brother, who was younger than her.”
Rachelle said Kim was very friendly and very outgoing. She was someone who liked to joke around and have fun, even though she had a pretty strict upbringing—they both did.
“We weren’t allowed to do a whole lot of stuff. In some respects her mom and stepdad let her do a few more things than I was allowed to do, but there were things that weren’t allowed in her house,” Rachelle said. “Her stepdad put a lot of weird restrictions on things. One example sticks in my head. She was only allowed to use the iron once a week. If she didn’t have all her clothes ironed at that point, she wasn’t allowed to go get the iron again. He wasn’t very kind back then. [Now] he’s a different person and a more kind person than he was back then. Her mom, she tried. She did her best to raise the kids in the best way she saw fit. I think Kim was slighted in her house, more so than her brother, because her brother was her stepdad’s natural child. He was definitely favored more.”
Rachelle and Kim remained friends through college, although they didn’t go to the same school. Rachelle went to the University of Pittsburgh and Kim’s first year of college was spent majoring in communications at Messiah College, a Christian college in Grantham, Pennsylvania. When Kim came home for the weekend, she often stayed at Rachelle’s house rather than her own.
“I think because of her stepfather’s interesting rules, she chose to come to my house,” Rachelle said. “She really was like a part of our family. My mom and dad were real close with her and she took family vacations with us.”
After her freshman year Kim decided to enroll at the Altoona branch of Pennsylvania State University. After a year there she transferred to Penn State’s main campus in University Park and continued majori
ng in communications, Rachelle said.
When Kim met Steve, Rachelle was living outside Philadelphia. Kim called Rachelle and told her that she was pregnant.
“But I didn’t even know she had been dating anyone,” Rachelle said. “She felt pretty strongly that Steve was the one. She wanted to spend her life with him and have a home with their child. When she met Steve and they had Sarah, she hadn’t finished school, so later she decided to pursue a health career and she enrolled in a local college that offered a surgical technologist program.”
Rachelle said although she didn’t know a whole lot about Kim’s marriage, she did have some concerns about their relationship.
“Steve was not the most outgoing of people,” Rachelle said. “I sensed that there were issues. I wrote her a couple of letters asking if everything was okay because it just felt weird throughout the marriage. He wasn’t particularly my cup of tea. Maybe it was because he was so introverted and I tend to be more outgoing as well. The few times I did visit them when they were married, I didn’t see much of him because he was holed up in their basement working out, or watching TV, or whatever, but I really didn’t see a whole lot of him.”
Rachelle said shortly before Steve died, Kim called her and whispered into the telephone that she wanted to get a divorce. But she couldn’t elaborate because Steve was nearby. Rachelle said she found out about Steve’s death from Maureen O’Toole-Miller.
“Maureen called me and told me that he had died in a hotel fire and that Kim was okay,” Rachelle said. “So I told my husband I have to go. I called Maureen back and she told me Kim was going to State College to the Hrickos and I packed up my stuff and went and stayed with my mother in Altoona. Then I went to the Hrickos’ house and hung out with her. She was pretty numb. She didn’t really say a whole lot. She definitely cried, but numb is the best word to describe it.”
Rachelle said Kim told her all the details surrounding Steve’s death and she believed her.
“I didn’t have any reason to believe otherwise,” Rachelle said.
When Kim said she wanted to go back to St. Michaels the day before Steve’s viewing, Rachelle wasn’t comfortable letting Kim go back by herself. She was afraid Kim would take her own life.
“So I went with her,” Rachelle said.
Rachelle said the first thing Kim did when they got to Harbourtowne was to go to room 506. Kim got out of the car, but Rachelle didn’t go with her.
“She wanted to go back to the room to see where he had died, because they got her out of there so fast that night,” Rachelle said. “She might have picked up some rocks or something to take back with her. Then she got back into the car and we went to see Mike Miller. The TV was on in the shop and there was a report about her possibly being a suspect and we talked about how crazy it was. That’s the first I knew they were looking at her.”
When night fell, Mike drove Kim back to the water’s edge behind the cottage where Steve had died. Mike didn’t know that Kim had already been to the room when she first arrived. When she got to the water, she told Mike she wanted to be alone. She got out of the car and walked along the riprap next to the water and then walked back again, all the time looking at the ground.
“Mike’s watching her and he’s thinking this is so freaking weird and he’s trying to keep her hidden so nobody will see her,” Maureen recalled.
Then Kim and Rachelle drove to Kim’s town house in Laurel.
“I had a three-month-old baby at the time, who was at my sister’s house, and I needed to get back to him, but Kim wanted to spend the night at the house,” Rachelle recalled. “I was uncomfortable leaving her there alone, so I made her swear and promise that, for me, she wouldn’t do anything to herself because I couldn’t live with myself for leaving her there if she did. I don’t know if that was what saved her at that point or not.”
Rachelle went back to Pennsylvania that evening. The next morning, Thursday, Kim headed back to State College.
Mike and Maureen drove to State College on Thursday morning, the day of Steve’s viewing, and went straight to Mike’s parents’ home. When she arrived, the first thing Maureen did was telephone Kim, who was at the Hrickos’ house.
“I told her I’d pick her up and we’d go over to the viewing early, just her and I. And she said, ‘I’d like that,’” Maureen said.
Later that afternoon as Maureen was getting ready for the viewing, she turned on the TV and started watching the local news. Soon the station started reporting a story about Steve’s death—but as a homicide, not an accident.
Infuriated, Maureen called the state police investigator in Easton to find out what was going on, but he wouldn’t give her any information. She then called the TV station and demanded to talk to the reporter, who explained that his information that Steve was murdered came from the Maryland State Police.
“I said, ‘You better make damn sure this is correct because we’re going to sue you,’” Maureen said. “This is an hour before Steve’s viewing. I was so flabbergasted that they would have the balls to lie and say it was a murder an hour before people were showing up for his viewing and they’re all going to be looking at Kim and wondering if she did it. The timing of it was really bad.”
Trying to put the news story out of her mind, Maureen picked Kim up at the Hrickos’ and took her to the viewing at the Koch Funeral Home.
“When I picked her up, I asked her if she knew they were reporting Steve’s death as a murder and she said she did,” Maureen said. “I asked her what she was going to do and she said nothing because it wasn’t true and she was just going to the viewing.”
As they walked into the funeral parlor, they noticed that the funeral director had set up two rooms—the first room contained flowers, as well as a photo display of Steve’s life, and the second contained more flowers and Steve’s casket. Even though Steve was cremated, the Hrickos decided to put a casket there for Sarah’s benefit.
Kimberly went into the first room and moved from one bouquet to the next, checking the cards to see who had sent the flowers. Next she went through the second room, where the casket was, and again began looking at cards in the flower bouquets.
“She started at one bouquet and went to two or three bouquets, then walked right by the casket and kept looking at flowers on the other side of the room. And she still hadn’t shed a tear,” Maureen said. “And I asked her if she wanted to kneel down and say a prayer and she said, ‘Oh, okay.’ So we went over and sat down and I started crying and she started crying a little bit and I’m thinking, ‘Finally we get some emotion out of her.’”
Soon friends and family began arriving. At one point during the evening people got up and talked about Steve.
“It was pretty emotional and Mike and I and Mike’s parents were sitting in the front row of the first room and Kim and her mother were in the front row of the other room—there are sliding doors that open, so it was really one big room,” Maureen said. “And there was this awkward moment when everyone was waiting for Mike to speak. He was the last person who was supposed to speak. But he couldn’t do it because he was too emotional.”
What happened next really caught Maureen and others off guard. Kim got up and went to the podium, instead of Mike, and began telling people that if Steve were alive, he’d be surprised that half of them came to pay their last respects and how much she appreciated everybody being there.
“It was almost like she was at a party,” Maureen recalled. “She was sort of pretending to cry. I’m thinking she has some guts to get up at the funeral of her own husband and maintain her composure and say something. I’m thinking, ‘Is this appropriate at the viewing?’”
After Kimberly finished, there was another pregnant pause while the visitors were waiting for someone else to get up and speak about Steve.
Mike was so upset he couldn’t do it. He sat in his chair with his elbows on his legs and his head hanging between his knees. Maureen told him he had to get up and talk, but he just kept saying he couldn’t
.
“But he had to—he was Steve’s best friend forever,” Maureen said. “So I got up and I talked instead. The thing I do remember I said, and I am so ashamed about it now, is, I said, that Mike and I would always be there for Kim and Sarah—no matter what happened.”
When the viewing was over and everyone began leaving the funeral home, they were met outside by a barrage of reporters and television cameras, including a crew from the tabloid television show Hard Copy.
As they made their way out of the funeral home, Maureen shielded Kim with her umbrella and her coat to prevent the reporters from filming her. When Kim got back to Steve’s parents’ house, around 10:00 P.M. she called Norma in Washington to say hello. Norma asked if Jenny was with her and Kim responded, “The Jenny who won’t support me. The Jenny who won’t talk to me.”
Norma asked Kim what she meant.
“Jenny called me the day after she came to see me and said, ‘I cannot support you through this right now. I’m sorry, but there are too many questions,’” Kim said.
“What questions?” Norma asked.
“I don’t know,” Kim replied.
“You don’t know,” Norma said.
“No,” Kim said.
Norma told Kim she had talked with Steve’s mother, Mary Esther Hricko, in State College the previous day. She said Mrs. Hricko told her that Kim had gone back to Maryland and would be back for the viewing. Steve’s mom also said the family had been getting some weird telephone calls.
Kim explained that the media had picked up on the story because of the murder-mystery dinner-theater angle. She said the local papers, as well as the Washington Post, had reported on Steve’s death. As for why she went back to Maryland, Kim said one of her friends took her back to Harbourtowne so she could get a handle on the “realness” of Steve’s death.
Not wanting to press Kim on her trip back to Maryland, Norma asked her what the newspapers were saying about how Steve died. Kim said one media report mentioned that accelerants had been used, but Kim told Norma that one fire marshal said that wasn’t true.
An Act Of Murder Page 8