Kim said she called the state police because she hadn’t heard anything about how the investigation was progressing and also because she thought some trooper might be leaking information. According to Kim, a trooper told her one officer was talking to the media because he was trying to make a name for himself and was trying to look important. Kim also told Norma the initial coroner’s report said Steve died of smoke inhalation and thermal burns, but the autopsy report wouldn’t be back for a couple of days. She said she was going to meet with the state police at the beginning of the next week to discuss it.
Soon their conversation turned to Jenny again. Kim said Jenny was just being selfish and thought everything revolved around her (Jenny). For the second time Norma asked Kim why Jenny would have questions about Steve’s death.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Kim said.
After a long pause Kim continued.
“About a thousand years ago Jenny and I joked about how we would have to kill Steve, but we were just joking. And I told her I could never do that,” Kim said.
“Even if I found you with a smoking gun standing over your husband’s body, I would be at the prison gate on the last day yelling, ‘I know what it looks like, but Norma didn’t do it,’” Kim said, referring to the fact that Jenny believed she had something to do with Steve’s death and refused to support her.
Kim then went on voluntarily to tell Norma what happened the night Steve died—or at least her version of the events.
“She started by saying that she and Steve went back to their room and took two beers back with them after the show,” Norma said. “She said the movie Tommy Boy was on and Steve got into his pajamas. She then backtracked and said he had a whole bottle of champagne and a couple beers through dinner.”
Kim told Norma that she had brought a “shitload” of Xanax with her. According to Kim, Steve’s doctor had doubled his depression medication and he had also been taking her Xanax.
“She said he made some kind of advances toward her and she was repulsed and left,” Norma recalled. “She said she drove around for what seemed like hours. She said she thought of going to her brother’s house or her friends’ house on the Eastern Shore, but realized she was a lot farther away then she originally thought,” Norma said. “Then she thought about going home, but couldn’t find Route 50. She said she was out in this Podunk town, where everything closed at eleven or eleven-thirty P.M., so she decided to go back to the resort.”
Although the first part of Kim’s story didn’t quite jibe with what she told police, the rest of it pretty much adhered to the story she had told investigators.
When Kim was finished with her account of the hours before Steve’s body was found, Norma asked her how the fire started.
“Kim said she didn’t know,” Norma said. “She said they showed her the box of cigars and asked if she recognized them. She said they had been sitting on her kitchen table for about a month, but she didn’t know Steve packed them, because they packed their own things separately.”
Again Kim told Norma she had packed a “shitload” of Xanax, as well as Flexeril, but she said when she got back the contents of their room, all the pills were gone. Kim told Norma what must have happened was that Steve decided to have a cigar, but he must have passed out because of all the alcohol and medication he consumed and then caught on fire. Kim speculated that there must have been a lot of toxic fumes in the room from all the flame-retardant materials, but she said he probably didn’t breathe them in if he was already dead.
“She said this in a way that sounded like she was thinking out loud to herself,” Norma said.
A few minutes later, the phone call ended.
The next day, Friday, Steve’s burial service was held at the funeral home—it couldn’t be held in church because Steve had been cremated.
When the family arrived at the cemetery, Hard Copy was waiting.
Kim’s brother, Matt, tried to keep the Hard Copy crew from trailing the family into the graveyard. In fact, he almost came to blows with the reporters.
Undeterred, the Hard Copy team followed the Hrickos to the graveyard and tried to take pictures of Kim at Steve’s grave site. Once again the family tried to shield Kimberly with their umbrellas, and after the burial they escorted her back into the waiting limousine. When the funeral director drove away, family and friends blocked in the Hard Copy car so the crew couldn’t chase Kim’s car.
The funeral director took the back roads and drove Kim to Mike’s parents’ house.
“Kim didn’t go to the reception at the Hrickos’ house, she came to ours instead to try to get away from Hard Copy,” Maureen said.
During the burial Mike’s mother stayed at home to get things ready for the reception her family was hosting. Before the guests began to arrive, Kim went into the Millers’ kitchen, pulled the plastic wrap off the lunchmeat tray, and started gobbling the lunchmeat down like she had never eaten.
“I looked at her and I said, ‘Hey, Kim, are you hungry?’ and she said, ‘I’m starving,’ and then she realized that I was looking at her like she had two heads and she immediately said, ‘I don’t know, I guess it’s because I’m nervous’; then she started making excuses while she was still gobbling down lunchmeat right after she buried her husband.”
About an hour after the Millers’ reception began, Maureen took Kim back to the Hrickos’ house. Before she left, she told Kim to call her the next day.
The next morning Maureen got a frantic telephone call from Kim.
“She was hysterical,” Maureen said.
Kim told Maureen the Hrickos were being mean to her and she needed to get out of their house.
“I’m sure they were horrible to her because they didn’t hide their emotions,” Maureen said. “And at this point I’m sure they thought Kim had done something. But I don’t know when they found out that Kim might have had something to do with it, because nobody would tell me anything. Later, I found out the police thought I helped her kill him and that’s why no one would tell me what was going on.”
During the early stages of the investigation, the police suspected Maureen because she was a pharmaceutical representative. They thought Maureen helped Kim obtain the succinylcholine. They couldn’t understand how Kim could have done everything by herself.
“Because I was taking care of her and because I was filtering all the messages from everybody else, the police thought that I was being way too protective of her. They thought I helped her,” Maureen said. “So I said [to Kim], ‘Why don’t you come to the Penn State basketball game with me and Mike and Mike’s family.’”
But Kim said no way. “I would rather have bamboo shoots shoved up under my fingernails than go to a basketball game,” she told Maureen.
Maureen was a bit confused. She figured if Kim was that desperate to get out of the house, what difference did it make where she went? So Maureen told Kim she’d get her a ticket for the game, but Kim said she’d rather get a massage instead.
“I said call me and I’ll check on you later when we get back from the basketball game, but she was pretty much expecting me to cancel my plans with Mike and the family to take care of her again,” Maureen said.
Kim called Maureen back about an hour later and asked if she could meet her at the massage studio after the basketball game, which started at noon. After the game Mike dropped Maureen off at the massage salon to meet Kim, then left planning to come back in an hour to pick Maureen up. After the massage, as they walked out to meet Mike, Kim told Maureen she had broken a nail and needed to get it fixed.
“Will you go with me to the mall to get my nail fixed?” Kim asked Maureen.
“I’m looking at Mike and thinking, ‘Oh, my God’—so I say, ‘Okay, I have to go to the mall anyway, it’s Jenny’s birthday and I have to get her a gift. I’ll take you to the mall.’ So we went in Kim’s car and I made arrangements with Mike to pick me up later at the Hrickos’ house,” Maureen said.
When they got to the mall,
Maureen brought Kim to the nail salon; then she went to the Lane Bryant store to get Jenny’s gift. When Maureen finished shopping, she went back to the nail salon to get Kim.
“When I got back to the nail salon, there she is talking like Chatty Cathy, like there’s no big deal, like she didn’t bury her husband the day before. And she’s carrying on like it’s social hour. And not only did she have her nail fixed, she was having her nails done—all of them,” Maureen said. “I’m trying to make excuses for her, like she’s going over the deep end and she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and I have to wait for her to get all her nails done while my husband is waiting for me at home. And I’ve spent like maybe twenty-four hours with him since his best friend died.”
The Millers were scheduled to drive back home together the next day, Sunday. But first they had to figure out how to get Steve’s truck back to Laurel from State College. The problem was that when Kim left State College to go back to St. Michaels with Rachelle on Wednesday, they went in Rachelle’s car. However, because Rachelle left Laurel before Kim did, Kim had to drive Steve’s truck back because her own car was still in State College.
So the Millers and Kim decided that Mike would drive Steve’s truck and Maureen would follow in their car.
“It killed him having to be in Steve’s truck and smell him and see all his stuff that had been there the day he died,” Maureen recalled.
After the Millers dropped Steve’s truck off at the Hrickos’ house in Laurel, Mike and Maureen drove back to Easton together.
Chapter 7
The day after Steve died, Kim’s friend Rachel McCoy contacted Corporal Keith Elzey. She was scared and crying. Rachel told Elzey that she didn’t think Steve’s death was an accident. In fact, she believed Kim killed her husband. Ultimately Elzey set up an interview with Rachel at her workplace in Baltimore for the next day, Tuesday, February 17, at 11:00 A.M.
After speaking with Rachel on the telephone, Elzey called Dr. David Fowler at the medical examiner’s office and told him there might be new evidence pertaining to the death of Stephen Hricko.
Norma Walz also called the state police on Monday regarding the Hricko case. Norma told Sergeant Karen Alt she believed Kimberly played a part in her husband’s death. Norma then directed Alt to call Jennifer Gowen, who had more information about Kimberly’s possible involvement. Alt contacted Jennifer and made arrangements to interview her and her husband, Sean, at their home in Silver Spring, Maryland, that evening.
During the interview Jennifer said that although Kim often talked about how bad her marriage was, she always made it seem like she had everything under control. But in the months before Steve’s death, Kimberly became increasingly negative about her relationship with him. She even told Jennifer she was thinking of asking him for a divorce. Kimberly said the only way she would stay in the marriage was if Steve completely changed his ways. Jennifer thought Steve did just that, but apparently Kim didn’t.
“Her opinions about him became more that he was like pathetic and she didn’t think he would be able to go on if they got a divorce,” Jennifer said. “She came to see him as a nonperson and she said several times that she had no feelings for him. During many of our conversations she said he would be better off dead because there was no way that he would be able to maintain a life without her and Sarah.”
Kim was also afraid that if she divorced Steve, he might turn Sarah against her, or make her life miserable in other ways.
“Kim said many times that . . . she thought that this whole situation could be best reconciled if Steve was dead, and she told me that she would like my support as far as being there for her unconditionally, no matter what happened,” Jennifer said. “And she said things like, ‘If I knew that I could kill him and get away with it, I would do it tomorrow.’ She would say that Steve needs to die. She said that she was tempted to tell Steve about the relationship she was having with Brad, so that he would get mad enough and kill himself because he had mentioned suicide in the past.”
But even if Steve committed suicide, Kim still wouldn’t be happy, because she wouldn’t be able to collect on his life insurance, Jennifer told Alt.
“So I think she really felt that the best way out of the situation was indeed to kill him,” Jennifer said.
Jennifer told Alt she and Kim were both surgical technologists. In fact, she said, that’s how they met. Jennifer explained that their jobs consisted of getting the operating room set up for surgery, assisting the surgeon during an operation, breaking down the room after the surgery was completed, and preparing the room for the next case. As part of their jobs she and Kim had access to numerous drugs, Jennifer said.
“Did there come a time when you and Kim discussed drugs that could be used potentially to kill people?” Alt asked.
“Yes. I always thought it was an interesting fact that there was a drug so readily available, a nonnarcotic, or a noncontrolled substance, that was just sitting around on almost any anesthesia cart, that could be used as a weapon or as a drug, that, to the best of my knowledge, could paralyze someone’s muscles, all of them, and they could die from a small amount of that drug,” Jennifer said. “We had discussed it, when Kim said, ‘Yeah, I need to get some good anesthesia drugs or Sodium Pentothal,’ and I said, ‘Well, hey, if you’re going to do it, I heard [about] a drug called succinylcholine,’ and I related to her how I had heard of that drug used in the past as a weapon.”
Jennifer then explained how succinylcholine worked when given intramuscularly.
“To the best of my knowledge . . . I guess what could happen is that the person would lose muscular control over their functions, and for a time they’re aware of what is going on because it takes a while for all your muscles to stop working. That would include the muscles that you use to breathe, and you stop breathing. Eventually you would be starved for oxygen and you would die because you couldn’t take in a breath,” she said.
Jennifer said about a month before Steve’s death, Kim talked about how she could use this drug to kill him.
“I know that Kim told me on [a] Friday night that she wanted my unconditional love . . . and that she didn’t understand why I couldn’t just accept the affair [with Brad] as something that people do,” Jennifer said. “She wanted to know why I couldn’t accept the lying to Steve and why I couldn’t accept that this is what she needed to do and she wasn’t necessarily ready to end it—the whole relationship with Brad—in a quick manner, or to go back to Steve and try to reconcile their marriage.”
Alt asked Jennifer to explain Kim’s definition of “unconditional love.”
“Kim felt that her definition of unconditional love was . . . that I could do anything, including—specifically—kill someone, and she would support me, and she asked that I support her in that way. . . . She didn’t ask for me to support her in something she was going to do, but she asked me [if] I would support her, no matter what happened. And she ended the conversation by saying, ‘If you killed someone tomorrow, I would support you,’” Jenny said.
Later in the investigation Alt spoke with Kim’s friend Teri Armstrong. Teri, who now lived in Pennsylvania, had lived next door to the Hrickos in Laurel for about two years. Sergeant Alt met with Teri at the state police barracks in Waterloo, Maryland.
Teri said she and Kim used to see each other every day until the Armstrongs moved away in August 1997. After that, Teri would spend every other weekend at Kim’s house and they would also talk on the telephone several times a week.
Teri told Alt about a conversation she had with Kim the New Year’s Eve before Steve died.
“She told me that she was going to be asking Steve for a divorce. I asked her if Steve had a girlfriend and she said no. I asked her if she was seeing anybody and she said yes, in a roundabout way,” Teri said. “And I asked her if they kissed and how they met and if they were having an affair, sexually, and she said no about that, but they had kissed. She said they weren’t going to be seeing each other until the divorce was fi
nal, which I agreed with. She told me it was one of her friends’ cousin and later I found out his name was Brad and he was in the military.”
Kim told Teri that when she asked Steve for a divorce, she knew he was going to try and take Sarah from her, but she wasn’t going to let him do that.
“But in my heart I didn’t believe Steve could do that,” Teri said. “I knew Kim enough to where I didn’t find that to be true.”
It seemed to Teri that Kim just didn’t want to deal with the hassles of a divorce—hassles from her parents and his family as well.
“She gave me the impression that she was under a lot of torment . . . but I just found this all to be out of sync,” Teri said.
Kim also told Teri that she had been thinking about several different ways of killing Steve, basically for the insurance money so she and Sarah could live well. Teri said a couple of months earlier, Kim had started feeding her negative information about Steve—about their sex lives and how he was raised and that his parents let him look at pornographic magazines.
“She said once when she came home from a trip, she caught him with things all over the house, sex magazines, and she was really embarrassed because she was with her girlfriend,” Teri said. “[Kim] also found out, without him knowing it, that he had been getting off with computer online [pornography]. Things like that. Like he only wanted to have sex in the morning—he didn’t want it at night. He only wanted it when he wanted it. I didn’t see Steve to be like that, but she never mentioned any of that stuff before. I just found it really strange, all of a sudden.”
During the interview Teri told Alt that she had spent some time alone with Steve about a month before he died. It was January 16 and Teri was supposed to meet Kim at the Hrickos’ house. When she arrived, Steve told her that Kim wasn’t home, so Teri spent about ninety minutes talking with Steve in the kitchen.
An Act Of Murder Page 9