An Act Of Murder (16 page)

In a note she gave Winkler before he went to North Carolina in December to visit his parents Kim told him she already missed him. She said she was thinking of being in his arms and kissing his neck. She told him he was important to her and that she wanted to have many years to learn about all of him. She told him to savor the time with his family and hurry back to her.

In a note Kim enclosed in the gift bag she gave Winkler for Valentine's Day she told Brad that she was proud of the job he was doing in the service. She said she missed him and loved him very much.

On June 4, 1998, a Talbot County grand jury indicted Kimberly Michelle Hricko on first-degree murder charges for the murder of her husband, Stephen Michael Hricko. She was also indicted on charges of first-degree arson and attempted first-degree arson. The indictment was handed up less than a week before Kimberly was set to appear in district court for a preliminary hearing on the charges.

Because of the indictment the state avoided the preliminary hearing, at which time Scott Patterson, the state's attorney for Talbot County, would have had to present enough evidence to convince a district court judge that there was probable cause to send the case to the circuit court for trial.

“We call a special session of the grand jury for all our murder cases in the county and what we put in our charging documents is the least amount of facts we need to get probable cause for the murder,” said Joe Gamble. “Just enough to get the person charged, and once we go to the grand jury, we tell them anything they want to hear. They can ask questions, but no information is released to the press.”

At a preliminary hearing police officers would have taken the stand and testified to the evidence they had in the case, Gamble explained. The defense attorney wouldn't have been able to put any witnesses on, but he would have been able to cross-examine the prosecution witnesses, he said. Then the district court judge would have determined if there was probable cause or not to send the case to the Maryland Circuit Court.

“We don't like to do that in murder cases because the grand jury is secret, and we tell the grand jury what we would have told the district court judge,” Gamble said. “So the grand jury indicted her and an indictment from the grand jury automatically goes to circuit court.”

The reason the prosecution called the grand jury was to avoid the preliminary hearing and not give Kimberly's lawyers the opportunity to cross-examine the police, he said.

“They'll cross-examine the police officers in a hearing,” Gamble said. “They'll want more evidence [immediately]. We have to turn everything over in discovery anyway, but discovery doesn't come for months and it gives us time to write our reports and get our evidence processed. And we didn't want the defense attorneys to question Joe Gamble on the stand and cross-examine me because they're going to cross-examine me at trial. And at trial I won't have to remember if at the preliminary hearing I said Kim was wearing a blue shirt or a pink shirt, because they'll bring out a transcript and say you said XYZ at the preliminary hearing.”

One of the witnesses who testified before the grand jury was David Scott Widener, also an inmate at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, who claimed he had a close relationship with Kimberly while they were in that facility.

Widener, who testified against Kim in return for a lighter sentence on several bank robbery charges, told the grand jury that he and Kim were best friends at Perkins.

According to Widener, he and Kim were together all day, every day, in the hospital's dayroom from 5:45
A.M.
until 9:00
P.M.
During that time, Widener said, he and Kim and another inmate talked about freedom and the crimes that brought them to Perkins. At some point, Widener said, he and Kim started talking about Steve's death.

“It was like two days after she came there that we first started talking about it,” Widener told the grand jury. “Somebody asked her what her charge was and she was directing the answer towards [
sic
] me. She had been charged with killing Stephen Hricko. She didn't admit it then, but she had just stated that she had been charged with Stephen Hricko's murder. And I said, ‘I know.' And she asked me how I knew and I told her it was pretty obvious. ‘You've been all over the news and newspapers. I know. I know what you're charged with.'”

Widener said although Kim didn't admit to killing Steve during that conversation, she did confess to him at another time.

He said Kim confessed to killing Steve one night when they were watching the television show
Dharma and Greg
in a special room that was off-limits to most inmates. While they were there, Kim started talking to Widener about the fire marshal's report.

“And she said, ‘I killed him, you know. I killed Steve . . . but they are not going to be able to prove it because they don't have forensic evidence,'” Widener testified.

Widener said Kim told him she used the drug succinylcholine to kill him.

“She told me when she was being questioned . . . by the state police, she said, they set the stuff on the counter in vials, the drug, and she said right then she wanted a lawyer. And she said what she used was succinylcholine,” Widener said.

Kim then laughed and asked Widener if he was planning on selling her out to get his sentence reduced. Widener said that's when the light went off and he decided to do just that. So he excused himself and went to the bathroom, where he wrote the name of the drug down on a napkin before he could forget it. He then went back into the television room and continued talking with Kim as if nothing had happened.

Widener said the next day he called his public defender to tell him about Kim's confession. And then he began keeping a journal of everything Kim said about Steve's death. He gave those notes to police the day before he appeared before the grand jury.

Widener testified that Kim said the heat from the fire in room 506 melted the television and that the smoke in the room was very thick.

“She was talking about how she thought the fire . . . may have burned the alcohol and drug out of [Steve's] system,” Widener said. “I didn't think that was possible, but I went along with it. Anyway, she was hoping the fire caused a lack of the forensic evidence they needed.”

Widener said Kim told him she injected Steve with succinylcholine, which she got at the hospital where she worked, and then got rid of the syringe. She said there was a needle found in a ditch in a surrounding neighborhood, but it had heroin on it when it was tested, according to Widener. Kim told Widener she lit a pillow on fire with a cigar. And she said that one of the fire marshals tried to light one of the pillows on fire with a cigar, but couldn't.

“And I told her that's probably because most pillows are fire-retardant,” Widener told the grand jury. “She said, ‘Well, the one he had wasn't. I didn't have any problems—it lit right up with the cigar.'”

Kim also told him that a guy she worked with at the hospital knew about her plan and also knew that she had taken the drug, Widener said.

“She also said she was seeing somebody, a younger man that was twenty-two. She didn't say his name [and] I didn't get into that. I didn't think that was too important,” Widener testified.

Widener said Kim told him that Steve didn't smoke, although he chewed tobacco. She explained that when she and Steve were looking to take out an additional life insurance policy on him, they learned that a smoker's policy was more expensive than a policy for a nonsmoker. She said the mandatory blood tests Steve had done indicated that he had nicotine in his blood, so they had to take out a smoker's policy. Kim told Widener because of the nicotine in his blood she would have the proof she needed to say that he smoked, even though he only chewed tobacco. Widener said Kim told him Steve wasn't smoking a cigar the night he died.

Kim also told Widener that after reading an article about the case in
People
magazine, a woman from Dallas, Georgia, called Kim's real estate agent to tell her that she had worked at a golf course and that the chemicals used on the course had made her ill. Widener said the Georgia woman called the real estate agent because she was the only person who had said anything nice about Kim in the
People
article.

“[Kim] planned on using that as some kind of defense, [claiming] that it would cause cardiac arrest,” Widener testified.

“Did she ever tell you why she killed her husband?” Patterson asked.

“Yes, she said that they weren't getting along the last month and that she was seeing somebody, a twenty-two-year-old. She said he was about my age,” Widener testified. “She said . . . [Steve] would stay up at night. He was making her sick. When she would wake up, she would see him staring at her—sitting in the bed staring at her. And all she could think about, these are her words, ‘All [I] could think about was how [I] could get rid of him.' She asked him for a divorce and he didn't want to divorce her. And all she could think of was how she could get out of it.”

Despite Widener's grand jury testimony, state's attorney Robert Dean, who eventually took over the case from Patterson, decided not to call him at trial because he didn't think Widener could help his case.

“I figured I had a strong case without him,” said Dean, who even went to visit Widener in a Maryland prison. “Widener testified in front of the grand jury and that's why I went out to talk to him to see what kind of a witness he'd make. But based on my experience you only call a jailhouse snitch, which is what he was, if you really are desperate. Another reason I didn't call him was because he wanted a deal and I wouldn't give him one.”

Even though Dean thought part of Widener's testimony to the grand jury might be true, he really didn't want the convict to be part of his trial team.

“And as I sized him up and his motivation—I couldn't see Kim cozying up to him for any reason and I thought the defense attorneys would have a field day with him, even if he was telling the truth. So I said no way was I going to put that guy on the stand,” Dean said.

However, Dean did have Widener brought to court every day as a sort of insurance policy in the event other witnesses, such as Rachel McCoy, didn't testify the way Dean expected them to testify.

“Better safe than sorry,” he said.

 

 

About ten days after Kimberly was indicted on charges she murdered Steve, Talbot County Circuit Court judge William Adkins asked officials at Perkins why Kimberly was still being held at that facility. The judge gave them a week to provide him with a report explaining why she was still there.

When Kim was arrested in February, Adkins sent her there for an evaluation to see if she was competent to stand trial. At that time the hospital's psychiatrists determined she was competent to stand trial. Adkins now ordered her to be held without bond at the Talbot County Detention Center. However, he ruled that she could stay at Perkins but would have to be sent immediately to the detention center as soon as she was released from the hospital.

A week later, Talbot County Circuit Court judge William S. Horne ruled that Kimberly would stay at Perkins until doctors there determined her condition had stabilized.

In a letter to Judge Horne, as well as in a hearing, Dr. Stephen Rojcewicz, a Perkins psychiatrist, said that Kimberly suffered from a “recurrent major depressive disorder.” He said she required inpatient care and treatment because of symptoms that included suicidal thoughts and urges, depressed mood, insomnia, and mood swings.

“These symptoms, and her recent increase in fragility and suicidal ideation, which is precipitated by court developments, such as her formal indictment for first-degree murder and the indication that the state will be seeking the death penalty, lead the hospital to its conclusion that she presents a danger to herself,” Rojcewicz said. “Mrs. Hricko remains on a maximum-security unit of the hospital. It was the hospital's intention to return her to the detention center once her condition stabilized and the presence of suicidal ideation diminished, or could be appropriately addressed by the detention center.”

Kim was ultimately transferred to the Talbot County Detention Center about a month or so before her trial began in January 1999.

In July, Kim's attorney, Harry Walsh, filed a motion to have the charges against Kim dropped because a witness might have lied to the grand jury. At the time Walsh did not name the witness, but one of Kim's friends said he was referring to David Scott Widener.

Walsh said he had received information that the witness might have given perjured testimony in order to receive a lighter sentence on bank robbery charges in another Maryland county. In a letter written to Kim's attorney, another inmate, who was Widener's roommate at Perkins, claimed Widener was testifying in order to get his original thirty-year sentence reduced to eight years.

“David repeatedly said, ‘That bitch is going to fry,'” his roommate wrote. “He also said to me that the reason he's doing this to Kimberly is that he doesn't know her—he just met her and he doesn't have to see her again when he gets out. He also said she's a girl and what's she gonna do to him. Other reasons he gave for doing so is that he has two twin sons and their mother to get home to and he said he has a newborn daughter to get home to—the daughter has a separate mother than the twin boys of David. And the last reason he gave was that he missed having sex with his children's [mothers].”

Widener's roommate believed that Widener gleaned whatever information he had from newspaper reports. In addition, he said some of Kim's court papers, as well as the charging documents, were stolen when she and Widener were assigned to the same ward at Perkins. The roommate implied that Widener stole them and that's how he knew so much about Kim's case.

Walsh believed that Widener's testimony had a lot to do with the indictment against Kimberly. In his motion to dismiss the charges against Kim, Walsh made it clear that Talbot County state's attorney Scott Patterson wasn't involved in any deal with Widener. He also said if the witness lied to the grand jury, Patterson wasn't aware of it.

Patterson said he would investigate the allegation, but insisted there was enough evidence without Widener's testimony for the grand jury to indict Kim on charges of murder and arson.