An Act Of Murder

by Linda Rosencrance

  “He was a nervous wreck,” Teri said. “He was so upset. He was crying. He was just really sad.”

  Steve told Teri that he wanted his marriage to work. He said he loved Kim and Sarah and really wanted to do better, and he promised he would do better. He said he was seeing a psychologist and taking antidepressants.

  “I always told him that if he ever needed to talk to me, to do so,” Teri said.

  While they were waiting for Kim, who was at Jenny’s house, Steve called the Gowens to find out when she was going to be home. However, there was no answer, so he left a message. He called a couple of times more, but he hung up when no one answered, rather than leave more messages. Steve also called Kim’s cell phone, but it was turned off. When Kim did finally come home, she looked like she had been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy. Although she looked tired and drained, Teri had a feeling she was faking.

  “She was overdoing it. [She gave] me the impression that she was faking this, being ill, but she wasn’t crying,” Teri said.

  Soon Steve went to bed and Teri tried talking to Kim, but Kim really didn’t want to talk about anything. Teri, though, wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  “Things had been bothering me because her relationship [with Steve] wasn’t like it was before, and I had to let her know how I felt about the situation because we had always talked about things,” she said.

  Teri told Kim to go easy on Steve—after all, he was trying. If she gave him a chance, he might even become the man he was when she fell in love with him. On the other hand, Teri told Kim to do what she needed to do. However, all the conversations Teri had with Kim in the weeks leading up to Steve’s death led her to believe Kim wanted a divorce.

  “She didn’t want to work it out. She wanted to leave, but she knew that there was really no way out [by] getting a divorce,” Teri said. “She knew she was going to get a lot of hassles.... She was not wanting to hear what other people had to say, but she did ask my opinion of the relationship.”

  Teri told Kim she thought the relationship was an unhealthy one. It seemed that Kim was always on the go, while Steve just sat around doing nothing except getting fat. According to Teri, Kim took care of everything around the house, including the bills. She said Steve was a couch potato.

  “He watched television lying in bed,” Teri said. “And he was rude to a point—lazy rude. Even when I would come over and [he would answer] the door and I would say, ‘Is Kim here?’ and he would say, ‘Yeah, she’s upstairs,’ and he would go and sit back on the couch, or his favorite chair. He never went to get her. I had to ask him if I could go get her.”

  Teri last saw Kim and Steve together on Friday, February 13, the day before they left for Harbourtowne. Even though Teri arrived at the Hrickos’ house late in the evening, she and Kim sat at the kitchen table and talked for about three hours. Steve went upstairs to bed and Sarah fell asleep downstairs, watching television.

  “I didn’t know what to say anymore. I didn’t know how to handle it,” Teri said. “I didn’t know what was going to be the right thing or the wrong thing because she just seemed to be a totally different person at this point. The Kim I saw that night . . . I mean, she just seemed to be changing every two weeks that I did see her. She was completely cold. She was cold.”

  On Monday, February 16, Dr. Fowler had called Elzey and told him the autopsy indicated that there was no carbon monoxide in Stephen Hricko’s blood, nor was there evidence of soot or burns in his trachea or related injuries to his lungs. That meant that Steve was either not breathing, or dead, before the fire in his room started. Fowler also said that, contrary to Kim’s statements that Stephen had been drinking heavily, there was no alcohol in his blood. Fowler told Elzey he was awaiting the results of other tests to determine exactly how Steve died.

  After speaking with Fowler, Elzey called Scott Patterson, the state’s attorney for Talbot County, to update him on the Hricko case.

  Later that afternoon Elzey and other members of his team, as well as members of the state police crime lab, went to Harbourtowne to do a search of the Hrickos’ room and the surrounding area. While they were there, they also searched room 1016, where Kimberly was taken after the fire.

  That evening Elzey got a call from Kimberly’s friend Marsha Carter (pseudonym). Marsha had taken care of Sarah while the Hrickos were at Harbourtowne. Marsha told Elzey about Kim’s affair with Brad Winkler. She said a couple of weeks before Steve’s death, she and Kim went to a pub in Laurel, where Kim met up with Brad. When they left the pub, they all went back to Marsha’s house, and Kim and Brad went upstairs to the bedroom and had sex.

  Elzey also got a phone call from Marsha’s boyfriend, who was unaware that she had already called the police. The boyfriend provided Elzey with essentially the same information that Marsha had.

  The next day, Tuesday, Elzey and another state police trooper met with Rachel McCoy at the Baltimore bank where she worked. Rachel told them that she and Kim had been friends since 1986. They met when they worked at Hoss’s Steak and Sea House. They quickly became best friends and roommates. Over the years they remained in touch, although they lost contact with one another for about a year-and-a-half when Rachel moved to Baltimore in 1988. They reestablished their friendship again shortly after Sarah was born. When the Hrickos moved to Maryland in 1991, Rachel and Kim once again became best friends. They talked on the telephone at least three times a week, went shopping, and went out to eat and to the movies.

  Rachel said that sometime in the fall of 1997, Kim told her that she was looking into divorcing Steve. Then one day, several weeks before Steve’s death, Rachel and Kim had lunch together and Kim confided in Rachel about the state of her marriage. She explained that she didn’t feel Steve was very helpful around the house. And it bothered her more and more every year that he didn’t like to go out and do things with her. Kim also told Rachel that when she asked Steve for a divorce, he cried and promised to go to counseling to keep their marriage together. Steve kept his promise, but Kim still wasn’t happy. In fact, she was quite annoyed at the “new” Steve.

  “We talked about [the fact] he had started seeing a counselor and that he was talking more and being more outgoing in their relationship. But he was talking to her all the time and that was driving her crazy,” Rachel said. “He wanted to talk to her all the time and talk about their feelings. And she told me that she was seeing somebody else.”

  When Rachel asked Kim if the relationship with Brad was serious—and was she going to leave Steve for Brad—Kim said no.

  “This is just about sex,” Kim said.

  After lunch the women went shopping. In the car on the way to the Marshalls department store in Laurel, Rachel and Kim were joking about putting their husbands in Steve’s truck and going up to Pennsylvania and pushing the truck off a cliff.

  “It would be so much easier if Steve were dead,” Kim said.

  On Thursday, January 29, Kim made plans to visit Rachel in Baltimore the next day. After work on Friday, Rachel went out with a coworker. She called Kim to see if she was still planning to visit. Kim said no, but asked Rachel to telephone her when she got home. When Rachel returned home about 10:00 P.M., she discovered that Kim had left five messages on her answering machine asking Rachel to call her as soon as possible.

  “The messages were gradually sounding more panicky,” Rachel said. “She said, ‘I really need to talk to you. Please, please call me. I just really need to talk to you. Call me as soon as you get in.’”

  When Rachel called her, Kim said she needed to talk to her and asked her to drive to Laurel right away, which she did.

  “She said, ‘Rachel, you need to come down here now. I need you. Do you remember when I saved you in State College? I need you. You have to come here now,’” Rachel said. “And I said, ‘Give me fifteen minutes to let the dog out and I’m on my way.’”

  Rachel arrived at Kim’s around 11:30 P.M. The first thing she noticed was that Kim was very nervous and it was obvious
that she had been drinking. Rachel asked Kim where Steve was and she said he was upstairs sleeping and Sarah was at a friend’s house for the night. Rachel and Kim went into the kitchen. Rachel sat at the table, while Kim sat on the floor across from Rachel. Kim was very upset.

  “She seemed very drunk to me, because she just kept running her fingers through her hair, crying,” Rachel said. “I’m like, ‘Just talk to me, tell me what’s wrong. I’m here.’”

  Kim then told Rachel that she had a plan to kill Steve and no one would ever find out that she had done it.

  “She said she either had a drug or could get a drug at work that she would inject in Steve that would cause his muscles to become paralyzed and stop him from breathing,” Rachel said. “Kim said the drug couldn’t be traced.”

  To make it look like an accident, Kim said, she would light a cigar or candles and set the curtains in the house on fire and burn the house down with Steve in it. That way it would appear that he died as a result of the fire and smoke. Kim told Rachel that her life would be so much easier. Rachel was terrified and tried to talk Kim out of killing Steve, saying she would surely get caught, especially since Steve didn’t smoke cigars.

  “I tried to poke holes in the story,” Rachel said, “I tried to say, ‘Where are you going to get this drug, and what if your house burns to the ground, your brand-new house? And what if your neighbor’s house catches on fire?’”

  But Kim had an answer for all of Rachel’s concerns. “She told me that she could get the drug at work very easily—that it was in every hallway or every operating room,” Rachel said. “She said that they used it for trauma victims to stop their breathing so they could put a tube in their throat to put them on oxygen. She said it wasn’t traceable in the blood. She told me the house wouldn’t burn down because there’s always neighbors up in that neighborhood and they would see the fire before the house burned and call the fire department.”

  Kim also told Rachel she had taken out a smoker’s life-insurance policy on Steve so people would think he was a smoker. She reasoned, albeit illogically, that because Steve chewed tobacco, she could use a cigar to start the fire and investigators would be none the wiser. And she reminded Rachel the drug she planned on using couldn’t be detected in Steve’s system.

  At this point Kimberly was sitting on the floor in a daze. Rachel was really scared, so she called Karen Porter (pseudonym), one of her neighbors in Baltimore, and told her about the conversation she just had with Kim. As she was talking to Karen, she noticed Kim walking upstairs. Worried that Kim was going to kill Steve right then, Rachel told her neighbor she was going to hang up, but if she called back in a few minutes—Kim’s telephone number would register on her caller ID—and then immediately hung up again, Karen was to call the police and tell them to go to the Hrickos’ house. After hanging up, Rachel ran up the stairs and found Kimberly in her bedroom standing over Steve while he slept.

  “Kimberly was standing there staring at Steve with the strangest look on her face—a look I’d never seen before,” Rachel said.

  Rachel told Kim they should go back downstairs, but she got no response. Finally Rachel got Kim’s attention and they headed back to the kitchen, where they stayed for a couple of hours. Rachel wanted to go home, but she didn’t know if she should leave Kim alone with Steve. Kim finally went upstairs to bed. Rachel waited about twenty minutes, then left. She got back home around 3:00 A.M.

  Rachel called Kimberly at 9:00 the next morning to see how things were going. Kim said everyone was okay, but she couldn’t talk because she wasn’t feeling well. Around 3:00 that afternoon, Kim called Rachel to tell her again that everything was fine. Rachel asked Kim if she was really going to kill Steve. Kim said she didn’t know what she was going to do. That was the last time Rachel spoke to Kim before Steve’s death.

  During the interview with police Rachel told Elzey that Kimberly wanted her to support her plan to kill Steve. She also told the police that she had never seen Steve smoke—only chew tobacco. And he very rarely drank—but when he did, he only drank Budweiser.

  Rachel told police that on February 15, 1998, Kim left a message on Rachel’s answering machine asking Rachel to call her at home as soon as possible. When Rachel called back, she spoke with Maureen Miller, who informed her about Steve’s death. Rachel said Maureen asked her if she would come to the Hrickos’ because Kim needed her, but Rachel said she wasn’t able to do that. Later that afternoon Kimberly called Rachel and asked her to drive to Laurel to be with her. Kim told Rachel that the police and the fire marshal had interrogated her and she was really upset. She said she needed Rachel’s support. Again Rachel refused.

  “Kim then told me she knew what I was thinking,” Rachel said. “And I said, ‘You know what I’m thinking?’”

  When the interview at the bank ended, the police went back to Rachel’s home to continue talking with her. While there, they spoke with Rachel’s neighbors Karen and Tom (pseudonym) Porter, who confirmed the fact that Rachel had telephoned them the night Kimberly first laid out her plan to kill Steve. The neighbors said Rachel called them at midnight on Friday, January 30. As the call came in, the caller ID displayed the Hrickos’ telephone number, a number neither Karen nor Tom recognized. They let their answering machine pick up the call. When they heard Rachel’s voice, Tom immediately put the telephone on speaker mode so both he and Karen could hear. Rachel told them that she was concerned about her friend Kim, who said she was planning to kill her husband.

  The Porters said Rachel told them that Kim was going to use a cigar or cigarette to burn down her house with her husband inside. They said Rachel told them that Kim was drunk, so she didn’t know whether to take her seriously or not. Tom told police he could hear Kim laughing in the background, reacting to what Rachel was saying. The Porters said Rachel told them how Kim had talked about using a drug to paralyze Steve. Before the call ended, the Porters told Rachel to call them back if she needed help or if she wanted them to call the police. Rachel did call them back an hour later from her car phone to tell them Kim had passed out and she was on her way back to Baltimore.

  The next day Elzey contacted Dr. Fowler at the medical examiner’s office to tell him that police believed that Kim used succinylcholine chloride, or a similar drug, to stop Steve’s breathing before setting him on fire. Fowler, who was familiar with the drug, said it was normally used as a muscle relaxant during surgery and/or to facilitate endotracheal intubation. Fowler said the drug should only be administered intravenously in those situations. When injected into the body, it would take between four and six seconds to paralyze a person’s skeletal muscles and for the person to stop breathing and then die.

  Later that day Henry Dove, the assistant state’s attorney for Talbot County, called Elzey to provide him with his firsthand information of the Hrickos’ behavior during the murder-mystery dinner-theater production at Harbourtowne. Dove, a cast member, said he was sitting at a table with the Hrickos and three other couples. According to Dove, although Kimberly was friendly and participating in the play, Stephen appeared to be bored or not interested in the play at all. Dove added that he didn’t think Steve had much to drink.

  Elzey also spoke with other couples in rooms adjacent to room 506. The couple in room 501 said they went back to their room after dinner and sometime between 1:00 and 1:30 A.M. a man started banging on their door, yelling, “Get out, get out, fire.” The couple in room 504 said they returned to their room around 10:50 P.M. after the dinner and play. At approximately 1:10 A.M. a Harbourtowne employee named Elaine was banging on their door, yelling, “Get out, fire.” The people in room 502 said they returned to their room around 11:00 P.M. They said sometime around 1:00 A.M. someone knocked on the door, but never said anything. A short time later, someone began banging on the door, yelling, “Fire.”

  Elzey made a mental note that the statements of these people directly contradicted Kimberly’s statement that after she discovered that her room was on fire, she started banging
on the nearby rooms, screaming for help.

  On Thursday, February 19, Elzey and Alt met Kimberly’s friend Marsha Carter at her job. Marsha, the woman who had watched Sarah while the Hrickos were at Harbourtowne, told police pretty much what she had told them over the telephone. She said that about two months before Steve’s death, Kimberly had met a United States Marine named Brad Winkler. She said they had started seeing each other after the wedding of his cousin, Sean Gowen, to Kim’s friend, Jennifer Moore.

  Marsha said that on February 6, while Stephen was home babysitting Sarah, she and Kim went to the Green Turtle Pub in Laurel, where Kimberly met Brad. Later that night, after leaving the pub, the three friends went back to Marsha’s house. As soon as they got there, Kim and Brad went upstairs to the bedroom to have sex, Marsha said.

  During the interview Marsha told Elzey that several months earlier, Kimberly had told her that she had asked Steve for a divorce. And sometime in January, Steve had called Marsha to tell her he wanted to work things out with Kimberly and that he was going to be a better husband. Although they were friends, Marsha thought it was very odd that Steve would call to talk to her about his feelings toward Kim.

  While Marsha was babysitting Sarah on February 15, Sarah injured herself as she was playing. Marsha took her to the hospital and was met there by Kim’s parents, who then took her home. Around 5:30 that afternoon, Marsha told Elzey, Kimberly called her to tell her about Steve’s death. Kim told Marsha that Steve started drinking heavily as soon as they arrived at Harbourtowne and continued drinking through dinner. When they got back to their room after dinner, Steve wanted to fool around, even though Kim specifically had told him she had no intention of having sex over the weekend. The couple started arguing and she left the room, hoping to find her way to the Millers’ house, she explained to Marsha. But she got lost and decided to go back to the resort, she said.

  However, she soon realized she didn’t have her electronic key card with her, so she walked around back to try to get in through the sliding glass patio door. That’s when she was hit with a wall of smoke and discovered the room was on fire. She told Marsha she ran around front and began banging on the other doors, yelling, “Fire.” When no one responded, she drove to the lobby to get help. She said she called 911 on her cell phone as she drove to the hotel’s main entrance. When the firefighters and police arrived, they found Steve’s body, she said.