When she opened the door, she was hit with thick smoke. She ran around to the front of the building and started banging on the doors of the other rooms in the 500 complex to get help, but failed. Then she jumped in her car and drove to the main building. When she got there, she ran into the lobby, asking for help because her room was on fire. At the same time she was calling 911 on her cell phone, she said.
During the interview Sergeant Alt asked Kimberly if she was having an affair. She said she wasn’t. Alt then asked her if she knew a U.S. Marine named Brad Winkler. Kim appeared shocked, but she didn’t say a word. Alt and Elzey told her they knew about her affair with Winkler. Kim bowed her head, then looked up and acknowledged the affair.
Kim explained that she started seeing Winkler several months earlier. She said she met him through her friend Jennifer Moore, who married Winkler’s cousin, Sean Gowen. She admitted she was having sex with Winkler, but said she never planned to leave Steve for him. She said Steve did not know about the affair.
Elzey asked Kim to tell him again how much alcohol Steve drank the night before he died. Kim said he was drinking heavily. Elzey then confronted her with the results of the medical examiner’s toxicology report, which indicated Steve had a blood alcohol level of 0.00.
Kim appeared stunned and said it didn’t make sense.
“Why don’t you explain to me, if Steve consumed so much alcohol, why didn’t it register?” Elzey asked.
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” Kim said, visibly shaken.
Next Elzey confronted Kimberly with the medical examiner’s report indicating there was no carbon monoxide or soot found in Steve’s body.
Again Kim appeared stunned.
“I don’t understand,” she repeated.
Kim lowered her head and then looked up.
“How can that be?” she asked, crying.
“Please tell me the whole truth about what happened that night,” Elzey said.
Kim bent over, put her head in her hands, and continued crying. Still crying, she got up, sat in another chair, and put her face in her hands.
“If I tell you what happened, can I go home tonight and see my daughter?” she asked.
Sergeant Alt told Kim if she told them the truth, she wouldn’t be able to see her daughter. Finally Kim said she wanted to tell the police what happened, but she wanted her lawyer with her. Elzey and Alt then ended the interview and read Kimberly her Miranda rights.
“Kim was almost ready to confess, but Karen Alt screwed up,” Gamble said.
“Kim says to Karen, ‘If I tell you the truth, will you let me go see my daughter?’ Karen tells her, ‘You know if you tell us the truth, you won’t be able to see your daughter.’ What she should have said—and one of the reasons we now have a homicide unit—is ‘Absolutely, we’ll take you right now,’ and then jump in the car and she’s in custody and you have her weeping all the way there and you have her confession,” Gamble said.
“I think she wanted to confess,” Gamble said. “I think Alt needed to be a little more swift on her feet and say, ‘Absolutely—you’ll be able to see your daughter.’”
After the interview was concluded, Kim left Harbourtowne and went to the Millers’ house for dinner.
“We had made plans that Kim would come down to our house on Monday, after she met with the police, who had called her and said they wanted to take her down to the hotel so they could explain to her what happened and how Steve died,” Maureen said. “She was meeting them at the Easton Barracks at ten A.M., and was supposed to come back to our house when she was done and stay for dinner.”
When 6:00 P.M. rolled around and the Millers still hadn’t heard from Kim, Maureen called the Easton Barracks of the state police to find out what was going on. A trooper told her that Kim was still at Harbourtowne with two troopers, but he didn’t know when they would be finished and he couldn’t interrupt them.
While the Millers waited, Kim’s mother, who was in Laurel taking care of Sarah, was calling Maureen, also trying to find out when Kim would be home.
Finally, around 7:30 in the evening, Kim came strolling through the door.
“What the hell is going on?” Maureen asked.
“They think I killed him,” Kim said.
Maureen couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“That’s where I’ve been all day long,” Kim said. “They’ve been interrogating me. They’ve been trying to make me say I killed him—that I was a battered wife and Steve beat me, so I killed him. They told me I might as well come clean and confess because they know that I killed him. They said all my friends had come forward and they had buckets of evidence against me.”
Not knowing quite what to say or do, Maureen tried to calm Kim down.
“What would give them the idea that you were abused?” Maureen asked. “Steve never hit you, did he?’”
“Never. He would never, never hit me,” Kim responded.
“Then why would they say that?” Maureen wanted to know.
“Because they’re trying to get me to confess,” she said. “They’re trying to get me to say I killed him.”
“Kim, you need to call a lawyer. This is going too far,” said Maureen, who, at this point, still thought Kim was being falsely accused.
But Mike knew something just wasn’t right. He’d suspected Kimberly was involved in Steve’s death from the beginning. And now he was more convinced than ever.
After rambling for a while longer, Kim told Maureen she was tired and didn’t want to talk anymore. She said she wanted to lie down.
“I told her to go to sleep, but told her in the morning we were going to sit down and talk about what was going on, because I didn’t like what she was saying. And I told her again she had to contact a lawyer,” Maureen said.
Kim agreed, so Maureen moved her daughter into the master bedroom and put Kim in her daughter’s bed. Once Kim was settled, Maureen called Kim’s mother, Lois, and told her Kim was going to spend the night. While Maureen was speaking with Lois, there was a knock on the Millers’ front door.
Taking the portable phone with her, Maureen went to the door. She was surprised to see the Maryland State Police standing there. The troopers said they needed to talk to Kim Hricko because they needed to serve her with a search warrant.
“I told Lois I needed to go because the police were at the door and they have a search warrant, and I have to go wake up Kim,” Maureen said.
At that very moment Lois started screaming hysterically into the phone.
“The police are here, the police are here!” she shouted. “There are four police cars and they’re knocking on the door.”
“Well, open the door,” Maureen said, exasperated.
“I’m going to have a heart attack. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown,” Lois said frantically.
“Lois, open the door for them,” Maureen said, forcefully.
Maureen later found out that the state police had timed their arrivals to the minute, so they could execute both search warrants at the same time.
“There are four policemen here and they want to come in and search the house,” Lois said again.
Maureen told her she had to let them in if they had a search warrant.
“I’ll call you back,” Maureen said, trying to get off the phone so she could deal with the troopers in her own home. “I’m really pissed because now I know I’m being lied to by Kim.”
At the Hrickos’ house Lois had just prayed with Sarah and tucked her in bed when the police knocked at the door to serve the search-and-seizure warrant.
“There were a number of police and I asked them to let me call my prayer partner,” Lois said. “They made [us] sit for four hours—they dumped everything out. I was so upset. We were scared, so Sarah and I just sat there and read the Bible. There was a policeman sitting with us because we weren’t allowed to move. They were there a number of hours. When they left, Matt took me to the emergency room because I have high blood pressure
.”
Some of the items police confiscated at the Hrickos’ home included letters to Kim from Steve, two pamphlets about life insurance, a white box containing sympathy cards, the cremation certificate for Steve’s body, miscellaneous papers and business cards, a letter to Steve from Kim, a Bell Atlantic Mobile phone bill, a checkbook register, and articles printed from the Internet pertaining to divorce and custody.
During the search of the Hrickos’ house, police also found two life-insurance policies on Steve, totaling $450,000, which they believed Steve never signed.
“We believe that Kim signed them,” Gamble said.
As part of the investigation Gamble learned that on December 8, 1997, Steve allegedly filled out a benefits enrollment card increasing his life insurance through work to twice his normal salary. As part of its benefits package, Patuxent Greens provided its employees with a term policy that would pay out one year’s salary to an employee’s beneficiary. The accidental death benefit of Steve’s new policy was $200,000, twice his annual salary.
Police learned that Kim took out a $250,000 life insurance policy on Steve in November 1996. As the owner and primary beneficiary of the policy—Sarah was the contingent beneficiary—Kim was making the quarterly payments of $114.08. Kim’s mother said the payouts from the life insurance policies have been put in a trust for Sarah.
After ending the call with Lois, Maureen went into the master bedroom and woke Kim up, telling her that the police were there to serve her with a search warrant.
“You need to get up out of bed right now,” Maureen told her.
So Kim got up and sauntered down the hall like she didn’t have a care in the world.
“And she’s mad—she’s nasty mad and throws the keys at the cops because the search warrant is for her car,” Maureen recalled. “And I’m thinking, for somebody who’s supposed to be innocent, she’s not helping herself very much.”
The trooper took Kim’s keys and went outside to search her car.
Angry, Maureen turned to Kim and said, “You need to come clean right now.”
“I will,” Kim responded. “I’ll tell you everything, but I don’t want to be down there while they’re doing this. Just let me go take a bath.”
“So once again, stupid me says, ‘Okay, I’ll go run the bathwater for you. You go in there and I’ll get a glass of wine for you. They’ll serve the search warrant, but then you’re coming out and you’re telling me what’s going on,’” Maureen said.
Maureen then went to the bathroom and started running a bath for Kim. Meanwhile, the state police were unloading Christmas gifts from the back of Kim’s car and bringing them into the Miller house. Apparently Kim had a number of undelivered Christmas gifts that she was supposed to give to kids in the CASA program, but they were still in the back of her car.
While Kim was in the bathroom, Maureen went in to check on her.
“She was just sitting on the edge of the toilet and I told her to get undressed and get in the bathtub,” Maureen said. “Then I went and turned off the water and left.”
Maureen went into her dining room, where the police were opening and searching the Christmas gifts.
“My dining room is filled with these gifts and the police are going through them, when one of the police officers starts running off at the mouth, saying that Kim is a horrible, evil person and they’re going to put her away for a very long time and that she murdered Steve,” Maureen said. “He was really angry.”
Maureen asked him why he thought Kim killed Steve, but he wouldn’t tell her anything because they still suspected she helped Kim kill her husband.
At that point Mike, who was in the room also, turned around and started yelling at Maureen.
“I told you,” Mike said. “It’s time for you to back away. You need to let her go.”
“I can’t let her go, she’s my friend, and until somebody tells me what’s going on here, I’m not going to do that,” Maureen told Mike. “I would never be able to live it down if they’re wrong—that I turned my back on her when she needed me the most.”
The troopers told the Millers that some people had come forward with information and they were going to put her away.
“They said maybe not tomorrow, or next week, or even a month from then, but they were going to get her,” Maureen remembered.
Upset and confused, Maureen went into the bathroom and saw that Kim wasn’t taking her bath. In fact, she was sitting on the toilet fully clothed.
“You can’t take a bath unless you take your clothes off,” Maureen said.
“I didn’t kill him,” Kim said.
“She’s talking and she’s slurring her words. And I knew she had taken something. At this point she’s teetering on the toilet, like she’s going to fall off,” Maureen said.
“Oh, my God, what did you take?” Maureen screamed as she searched the bathroom.
Soon Maureen found an empty bottle of pills that had Xanax written on it. Frantic, Maureen told Mike to call an ambulance. Mike, however, was furious that Kim would try to commit suicide with his kids in the house.
The ambulance arrived and took Kim to the Easton Memorial Hospital. Maureen followed in her own car. On the way she received a call from Mike, who told her when he was cleaning up the bathroom, he found razor blades on the edge of the bathtub.
“Apparently Kim staged it to make it look like she was going to get in the bathtub, slit her wrists, and kill herself, because it turned out that the medication she had actually taken was not Xanax, according to the toxicology report,” Maureen said. “Kim put something else in the Xanax bottle and that’s what she took.”
The nurse at the hospital told Maureen that Kim would be fine. In fact, the nurse said that Kim would have been worse off taking a bottle of aspirin.
While she was waiting for Kim, Maureen, who was three months pregnant, started to feel really ill. The nurses took her blood pressure and found that it was sky-high. So they asked her to stay in the emergency room until they determined she was okay. In the meantime emergency room personnel were pumping Kim’s stomach.
When they were finished, Maureen went to talk to Kim.
“You’re a stupid idiot, Kim,” Maureen said. “Why are you doing this? You’re innocent.”
At least that’s what Maureen wanted to believe.
In hindsight, though, there were a lot of things that indicated that Kim was guilty of murdering her husband. However, Maureen still wasn’t totally convinced that Kim had killed Steve.
“I needed to know for sure because I didn’t want to make a mistake,” Maureen explained. “This was a person who was at a point of desperation.”
Although she helped Kim, Maureen was starting to get a bit annoyed. She wanted Kim’s family to step up to the plate and make some decisions about her welfare.
What Maureen wanted and what she got were two different things.
“Kim’s mother was absolutely no help whatsoever,” Maureen recalled. “She was hysterical at everything and she would call these people over and they would start prayer chains. And I’m like, ‘Do you all understand what’s going on here.’ It was almost like if they prayed, everything would go away. They just had no sense of reality.”
Finally Maureen left the hospital, telling Kim she’d be back to check on her the next day.
When she got back to the hospital the next day, Maureen helped Kim out with some insurance issues and also called an attorney friend, Harry Walsh, to ask him to represent Kim.
Walsh agreed, but he said he’d need a $10,000 retainer. Kim agreed and Walsh said he’d come by the hospital at 2:00 P.M.
“We dealt with a couple of the insurance issues, but in the meantime she’s trying to get her family to give her ten thousand dollars for the retainer fee, but they wouldn’t give it to her,” Maureen said. “She even called the Hrickos and asked them for it and was mad because they wouldn’t give it to her. She wanted to know why the Hrickos wouldn’t give her the retainer, because they had tons of
money.”
Kim soon started panicking because she didn’t have the money for the retainer and didn’t know how she was going to get it. She tried to call her father and he said no. Then she called her grandfather and he wouldn’t give her any money, either. Maureen just couldn’t understand why Kim’s family wouldn’t help her.
“Kim was talking nasty about the Hrickos because they wouldn’t give her any money,” Maureen said. “And then she told me that Jenny Gowen was the one who was telling the police stuff. She said Jenny was lying and she wanted me to call Jenny and find out what she was saying, but I said I wasn’t calling her, and if she wanted to know what Jenny said, then she should call her. I told her I wasn’t getting involved.”
Kim actually had told four of her friends what she planned to do to Steve. There was Norma Walz, Teri Armstrong, Jenny Gowen, and Rachel McCoy, although Rachel was the only one who knew Kim’s entire plan to kill Steve. The others only knew bits and pieces of the plan.
“I still don’t know how much Jenny and Teri knew,” Maureen said. “I think Jenny and Teri knew less than Rachel, and I think Norma knew very little.”
Even though Kim pressed Maureen to call Jenny, she refused.
Kim continued to turn to Maureen for help, because now that the police were onto her, no one else—not even her family—would help her.
“There was only me,” Maureen said. “Stupid me.”
Overwhelmed, Kim started crying really, really hard. And Maureen started to feel sorry for her again.
“This was the first time I had seen her cry hysterically since Steve died,” Maureen said. “But I don’t think she was crying for Steve. I think she was crying for herself.”
And, again, Maureen wanted to help her.
“Here she was in a hospital on suicide watch with a nurse in her room around the clock,” Maureen said. “I said, ‘Kim, I wish there was something I could do, I really do,’ and then she leaned forward and whispered something to me. And to this day I cannot say exactly what she said, but I think she said, ‘I killed Steve.’”
An Act Of Murder Page 13