An Act Of Murder (2 page)

“When we finished the show, I still hadn't eaten my dessert, so I sat down to eat that and most of the rest of the table stayed and kept talking to me for about another half hour, even though the rest of the crowd had broken up,” Dove said. “The Hrickos stayed at the table with at least two other couples and me and my date.”

Soon the Hrickos went back to their room, stopping to buy a couple of beers to take back with them.

At 1:21
A.M.
Kimberly Hricko walked into the hotel's main lobby to report a fire in her room.

What happened when the Hrickos got back to their room is unclear, but here's what Kim had to say about the events of that weekend, some of which she told police.

 

 

Kim didn't work Friday, February 13, because she had a doctor's appointment at 8:30
A.M.
, as well as errands to run. The doctor's appointment was for a sigmoidoscopy. This is a procedure that enables a physician to look at the inside of the large intestine from the rectum through the last part of the colon, called the sigmoid or descending colon. The test left her feeling completely drained.

Later that night she met her friend Jennifer Gowen for dinner at Mi Rancho in Silver Spring, Maryland. She didn't sleep well Friday night and awoke exhausted. She wasn't really excited about the weekend.

It seemed she really hadn't been looking forward to going to Harbourtowne since Steve told her about it. In fact, she spoke with her counselor about Steve's plans for a romantic weekend, saying that she was very tired and didn't want to go away. Kim told her counselor that she didn't think it would be a very pleasant weekend.

On Saturday, February 14, after dropping Sarah off at a friend's house to spend the night, Kim and Steve drove to St. Michaels. Kim slept most of the way there. Kim knew Steve was taking her to Harbourtowne, but she didn't know exactly what he had planned.

“On our calendar at home, Steve had marked the day with ‘Keep open,'” Kim said.

After checking into the hotel, the couple drove to their room. Kim still had no idea what surprises Steve had planned for the evening. When they got to their room, Kim noticed what looked like a wedding invitation on a table. After reading it, she discovered they would be taking part in a murder-mystery dinner theater. Now she knew why Steve told her to pack something nice to wear.

“Steve and his friend Mike [Miller] planned the dinner. The weekend was a surprise for me,” Kim said. “Steve and Mike had been friends since grade school. They had been talking more recently because Steve was falling apart. He was under so much pressure at work to do a good job. He really let it get to him. Our marriage was strained, too,” Kim said.

The room was freezing, so Kim started a fire in the woodstove with the log provided by the hotel. She also made a pot of coffee and spread out on one of the room's two beds with the Sunday newspaper.

Steve opened the complimentary bottle of champagne and poured each of them a glass.

“I didn't like mine because it tasted cheap and didn't drink any more,” Kim said. “Steve drank the rest of the bottle.”

Because they had missed lunch, Steve drove to a convenience store, where he purchased two hot dogs, Tastykakes, and soda. While he was gone, Kim unpacked and hung a pair of wet pants, which she had washed at home that morning, out on the deck.

“We spent some time watching TV and enjoying the view from our porch,” Kim said. “It was extremely windy and the water was choppy. It was damp and gray—too cold to stay outside long.”

Before the couple went to dinner, Steve took Effexor, medication for his depression—he had been on the drug for about two weeks and the dosage had recently been doubled. Steve took the medicine at the same time every day. He only brought enough medication for the weekend, not the entire bottle. Steve also took Xanax, used to treat anxiety, and Flexeril, a muscle relaxant, at some point during the evening. The couple took their time getting ready for dinner.

“When we went into dinner, they had a receiving line just like a real wedding,” Kim said. “We had more drinks. We joined three other couples at our table. One person at our table had ordered a bottle of wine and shared it with everyone. We ordered several rounds during dinner and put one round on our room number. There was a cash bar outside [the dining room] and Steve and I got several beers there after the play and we took them back to our room.”

During dinner, while the murder-mystery play was under way, Kim and another woman from her table got up and walked around, interacting with the actors.

“The actors encouraged us and seemed somewhat disappointed that everyone seemed to stay planted in their chairs. This lady and I teamed up,” Kim said. “Before leaving the lobby [after dinner], we got a second log for the fireplace.”

When the Hrickos got back to their room, they turned on the television and watched
Tommy Boy,
with Chris Farley. Steve changed into a T-shirt with a logo on it and lightweight sweatpants and had a chew. Steve had chewed tobacco for years. Steve heated some water in the coffeemaker for his Theraflu and drank it. The whole family had had bronchitis and strep throat. Steve still had it because he was the last to get it.

“By the time I took my Zoloft, all Steve's pills were gone,” Kim said. “After we watched the movie, Steve was showing some signs of having a little too much to drink. He normally does not give any indication that he has had too much to drink. The movie made us laugh, but still we did not talk about our problems.”

The Hrickos had a brief, but not loud, argument over sex—Steve wanted it, Kim didn't.

“We had both been seeing counselors and along with our counselors the decision had been agreed to in advance that the weekend getaway would be just to relax with each other and have a good time,” Kim said. “It had been agreed that we would not be intimate on this weekend. It had been many months since we had been intimate.”

After the movie Steve approached Kim for sex. Kim got upset and left the room. She got into her car and drove around Easton. But she wasn't sure where she was because she had been sleeping on the trip to Harbourtowne and had only been to the resort once before, three years earlier with her friend Maureen Miller, who drove to the hotel from her home in Easton.

Kim thought of driving home but decided against it because then Steve would have no way to get back to Laurel. As she drove around—she told police she was trying to find the Millers' house in Easton—she got lost. She was trying to find Route 50, the main drag in Easton, but every road she hit had a “3” in it. She stopped to ask for directions but was still unable to find her way. She was very tired and getting more confused.

“I have always been very poor with roads and directions and always seemed to be lost. I could have crossed over Route 50 and not have known it,” Kim said. “I think I asked three people for directions—one person was in a white Volvo. I saw a mixed-race couple in Historic Easton and I remember the woman was holding a single rose and I thought, ‘How sweet.' I asked them how to get to Harbourtowne and Route 50. The couple told me that the two were in opposite directions and asked me which one I wanted. So they gave me directions back to the hotel and I eventually found my way back to the resort.”

When Kim got back to her room, she realized she had forgotten her electronic room key. She didn't want to knock because it was so late, so she went around back, because she remembered the sliding glass door had been opened. It was still unlocked. As Kim opened it, thick, oily smoke and intense heat poured out. She couldn't see her hand in front of her face. There was no light, nor was there a smoke alarm sounding. Panicking, Kim ran to the surrounding units, knocking on the doors, waiting for someone to hear her. But there were no sounds or lights in any of the rooms. When no one responded to her pleas, she jumped in her car and drove to the lobby. It was approximately 1:15 or 1:30 in the morning. As she drove, she called 911 on her cell phone.

When she reached the lobby, which was in a separate building, she parked the car directly in front, partly on the sidewalk. She ran into the building screaming for help while still on the cell phone with emergency personnel, who were asking her to calm down so they could get the pertinent information from her.

“So when I walked into the lobby, I was already involved with the emergency operator, giving them the exact location and directions to my room,” Kim said. “They just keep saying over and over, ‘Calm down,' and kept asking questions. I understand a woman said I walked in calmly and a man said I walked in hysterical. I was hysterical! Everyone present left and I didn't know what to do, so I ran on foot to the unit because I was too upset to drive. I know I left the keys and purse in my car and I think I left the motor running.”

Kim followed people from the lobby back to her room.

“The police were at the cottage with cars. A lady held me back, pushing my head onto her shoulders and squeezing me. I heard over the police car radio, ‘We have a white male, DOA.' From that information I knew that Steve was deceased without anyone telling me. The voice probably came from around on the porch side of the cottage over a walkie-talkie or radio. I never went into our room or saw Steve before I was taken away. I tried to get away from the lady and a policeman, and was screaming, ‘I want to see him.' I understand the lady misquoted me saying, ‘I want to see his body.' No one offered to help take me to the hospital to meet with the doctors or see if there was anything that I could do for Steve.”

It was nearly 1:00
A.M.
and Elaine Phillips, Harbourtowne's banquet manager, had just finished up for the night. After working a twelve-hour shift she was glad for some downtime, which she spent socializing with her aunt, Bonnie Parker, her cousin, Philip Parker, and his girlfriend, who were spending the weekend at the resort. Phillips and her family had just called it a night and were walking through the lobby when Kim entered and said she needed to speak to a Harbourtowne employee.

“A woman walked into the lobby. She had a cell phone up to her ear. It was turned upside down. She was just listening into it,” Phillips said later. “She walked over to us, my cousin and I, and she said, ‘I need to speak to someone who works here.' My cousin, who was about a step ahead of me, kind of directed her to me. I asked her, ‘May I help you?' And she said, ‘My room is on fire.'”

Phillips immediately asked Kim what her room number was, but Kim didn't answer. So Phillips then asked her what her name was and Kim said Hricko. Remembering the spelling of Kim's name, Phillips spelled it out for another Harbourtowne employee, who looked up the Hrickos' record and shouted out that their room number was 506.

Phillips immediately called 911 to report the fire, while her cousin asked Kimberly if she was okay. The emergency operator told Elaine Phillips that the fire already had been called in.

As soon as she got off the phone, Phillips ran out of the lobby after her cousin, who was already on his way to the Hrickos' room. When Parker got outside, he could smell smoke and started following his nose to the fire. As soon as Phillips caught up with him, she pointed him in the direction of room 506. When the pair arrived at the grouping of rooms that included 506, Parker couldn't quite tell which room was on fire, so he started banging on the front doors of all the rooms. Then he went around to the back of the building, where he could see the smoke in the Hrickos' room through the sliding glass door.

First Parker grabbed one side of the door and tried sliding it open. It wouldn't budge. He noticed a chaise lounge on the deck and turned to ask his cousin if he should throw it through the glass door. Phillips told him to wait until she got a fire extinguisher in case the flames shot out of the room when he broke the glass. While Phillips went around front to get the fire extinguisher, Parker got down on his hands and knees on the rear deck and looked inside to see if there was anyone in the room. All he could see was the faint outline of someone's feet. Parker jumped up and noticed that the other side of the sliding glass door was open slightly. Smoke was pouring out of the opening. Parker opened the sliding glass door all the way, crawled inside on his hands and knees, and made his way to the person in the room.

The smoke was so thick Parker could only see about a foot in front of him. When he finally got to Steve's body, which was lying faceup on the floor in between the room's two beds, he started beating him on his stomach, trying to wake him up. Steve didn't wake up, so Parker decided the only way to help him was to get him out of the room. He tried grabbing Steve by his arms, but when he did, his hands just slid off. He couldn't seem to get a good grip, so he tried dragging Steve out by his feet. Parker got Steve's body to the edge of the sliding glass door, but couldn't pull him over the raised threshold. Parker yelled for his cousin, who also grabbed Steve and helped pull his body out onto the deck. Once outside, Parker and Phillips saw that the upper part of Steve's body was very badly burned. It was obvious to them that Steve was dead.

As soon as Parker got Steve out onto the deck, he remembered that his fiancée had been right behind him when he was running to the Hrickos' room. He remembered when he was inside he could hear her yelling to him through the sliding glass doors. He didn't want her to see Steve's body, so he grabbed hold of her and tried to rush her around the corner of the villa. When the couple reached the side of the building, they saw Officer Patrick Sally and Officer Stephen Craig, St. Michaels police officers, getting out of their cars.

“As I arrived and got out of my vehicle, I observed two individuals, later identified as Philip Parker and Elaine Phillips, waving and yelling that there was a man down in the back,” Sally testified later.

Sally, Craig, and their sergeant raced around the corner to the back of the building. As they approached the back porch, they observed Steve lying there on his back with his left arm sticking straight up in the air. He was wearing a pair of light blue pajama bottoms that were pulled down, exposing his penis, and pulled up high on his shins. He was also wearing what appeared to be a white T-shirt, which had been burned. His chest and head were severely burned. It was obvious to the officers that Steve was dead. Sally checked Steve's body temperature and found that it was elevated but not hot. His upper torso was stiff, either from the heat of the fire or from rigor mortis. His left arm was sticking straight up in the air and bent slightly backward. Sally attempted to take Steve's pulse, but felt nothing.

Officer Sally now went inside room 506 to make sure no one else was inside and determined it was empty. As he looked around, he noticed that there was a lot of smoke damage to the room. He saw that the mattress closest to the bathroom was smoldering and completely burned, exposing the springs. The headboard was charred and the carpeting around the bed was melted and charred. As Sally was looking around the room, members of the St. Michaels Fire Department, as well as members of the Talbot County Sheriffs Department and the Maryland State Police, arrived and Sally apprised them of the situation. Sally then secured the perimeter of the villa and stayed there until 5:00
A.M.

While Sally was checking the room out, Officer Craig went around to the front of the building to help evacuate other guests and to speak with Philip Parker, who said he was the person who pulled Stephen Hricko out of the room and onto the deck. As Parker and Craig were talking, Kimberly approached Craig. She was holding her cell phone in her left hand. She kept saying she wanted “to see the body,” although she hadn't yet been told that Steve was dead. Craig told her that the rescue squad was with him. He said Kim was at times hysterical and then despondent.

“She was very upset and could not stand without assistance,” Craig said.

Craig put her in his police car and tried to calm her down. Philip Parker told Craig that he could bring Kim to his room so police could talk to her. With the help of Philip Parker's mother, Bonnie, Craig brought Kim to room 1016 in the main building. Once in the room, Kim asked Officer Craig to call Steve's best friend, Mike Miller, which he did. Craig told Miller that the fire marshal would be coming to speak to Kim about the fire. After several minutes Kim went to lie down on one of the beds and fell asleep briefly. When she awoke after a few minutes, she again began to ask about her husband's condition.

Also on the scene in the early-morning hours of February 15 was state police trooper Clay Hartness, who was assigned to the Easton Barracks. Hartness arrived at Harbourtowne around 1:30
A.M.
and immediately went to the back of room 506, where he spoke with members of the St. Michaels Fire Department, who informed him of the death of Stephen Hricko. Hartness looked around and saw the badly burned man lying on the back porch with his head partially inside the open sliding glass doors. Hartness then went inside the room and surveyed the damage. After exiting the room, Hartness was met by Deputy Scott Kakabar, of the Talbot County Sheriffs Department, who initially contacted the state police. Kakabar brought Hartness up to speed on the investigation. Several hours later, the state police took over the investigation.

Hartness contacted Father Paul Jennings, the state police chaplain, and the two men went to room 1016 to notify Kim formally of her husband's death. When they got there, they discovered that the Parkers were in room 1016 and Kimberly was in an adjoining room, standing near the glass windows at the far end of the room. Jennings introduced himself and Trooper Hartness and asked Kim to sit down on the edge of the bed so he could talk to her. When she was seated, Jennings knelt down in front of her so he could talk to her face-to-face. He told her Stephen was dead.

“I found her in an agitated state and apparently slightly intoxicated,” Hartness said. “Upon learning of her husband's death, she exhibited little reaction beyond a few muffled sobs and moans.”

Jennings agreed that Kim showed very little emotion.

“Her response was not very emotional,” Jennings testified later. “I was kneeling and Trooper Hartness was standing next to her and then he asked her what happened and she proceeded to tell us her version of the story.”

Kim told Hartness that after leaving the murder-mystery production, she and Steve bought some beer from the bar and returned to their room. Once in the room Steve began pressuring her for sex, she said. When she refused, Steve became “pushy” and was “groping” her. She said she continued to resist Steve's advances and then they started arguing. She told Hartness “I didn't want to get into it, so I got my keys and my purse, got in the car, and left.” She said she drove to Easton looking for the home of some friends, but she said she wasn't familiar with the area and never found the house. She said she couldn't even find Route 50 and had to get directions back to St. Michaels. Kim told Hartness that when she got back to Harbourtowne, she realized she didn't have her electronic key card to get back into her room.

She said she remembered that she and Steve had been using the sliding glass door and thought it might still be unlocked, so she went around to the back of the complex. Kim said she pushed the door open and was confronted by thick smoke. She said she screamed, pushed back the curtain, and felt around for the light switch, but couldn't find it. She told the trooper she ran to the other rooms and knocked on the doors, screaming for help, but no one answered. Next she drove to the main building and went into the lobby, screaming that her room was on fire. She said several people who were in the lobby quickly ran to her room. She told Hartness she tried to go back to the room, but she was stopped by “someone in a uniform.”

While Hartness and Jennings were with Kimberly, Deputy Scott Kakabar arrived to speak with her. After listening to Kim's version of the events leading up to Steve's death, Kakabar called the Maryland State Police Criminal Investigation Division and the Maryland State Police Crime Laboratory.

Fire investigator Mike Mulligan, a bomb technician and a canine handler, was also called to the scene before the state police arrived to take over the case. Mulligan came to Harbourtowne, sometime after 2:00
A.M.
, with Bear, a black Lab, trained to detect explosives and accelerants at a fire scene.

Mulligan was called because the fire investigator in charge of the scene, Paul Schlotterbeck, was suspicious of the fire from the beginning. Schlotterbeck thought there was a possibility that the fire was set and that Steve had been murdered. That was the reason he called in the state police and the sheriff's department, as well as Mulligan and Bear.

Schlotterbeck thought something just wasn't quite right. And it had something to do with the way Kim conducted herself when the investigators initially talked to her. When Mulligan arrived at the scene about an hour after he was called, he conducted a test to make sure Bear was in the mood to go to work—and he was.

“What you do with a scent-detection dog is you put out a sample to see if they're working,” Mulligan explained. “What I had was an eyedropper with evaporated gasoline in it and I put a drop out somewhere in the parking lot in front of the [building] and then I took the dog out of the car and took him for a little walk to see if he could detect any petroleum-based accelerants in the vicinity. And he gave me a hit where I put the drop of accelerant. The way he let me know that there was an accelerant present is he sat down and looked at me. He was on play reward, not food reward, which means I threw a little ball for him, and that was his reward for doing that work.”

Next Mulligan took Bear into Kim and Steve's room. When he first entered the room, he stood for a minute in the foyer and noticed that there was a heavy deposit of soot in the room, and he knew that the room had been filled with a lot of smoke. He looked around and noticed that although the windows were black, they had not been burned by the fire.

“There wasn't much flame damage to the room—not as much as I would normally see in the course of my work,” Mulligan said. “You usually find a room has burned further than this one. This fire smothered itself out because there was a [low level of oxygen] and therefore the fire damage was relatively minor.”

When Mulligan walked into the main room, which was approximately twenty feet by thirteen feet, he observed two double beds that were separated by a nightstand. The headboards were attached to the front wall. A wooden entertainment center with a television in it was located against the back wall and there was a masonry hearth in front of the first bed. There was a small metallic wood-burning stove sitting on the hearth. The doors to the stove were open and Mulligan could see the remains of a store-bought “easy light” log wrapper among the warm embers in the stove.

Past the hearth and wood-burning stove, along the back wall, was a sliding glass door that led to a covered wooden deck. In the corner, past the sliding door, was a padded chair. A heating unit/air conditioner was on the side wall behind the padded chair. There was a window with curtains on the side wall. There was also a desk located close to the heating unit.

When Bear first entered the room, he indicated he detected an accelerant on the sliding door. Mulligan later found out that when Parker dragged Steve out of the room, he left him near the sliding door for a short time before dragging the body out farther onto the back deck.