An Act Of Murder (6 page)

Part of the problem centered around the personality differences between Kim, who was a very outgoing woman, and Steve, a more introverted kind of guy.

In her job as a surgical technologist, Kim became friends with a number of doctors and she would often invite these doctors home for dinner or drinks. But Steve didn't like Kim's work friends. He thought they were phonies.

“He felt they kind of put on airs and having these people over just wasn't his cup of tea,” Mike said. “Kim would get a little perturbed when she would invite these people over and Steve would say fine, invite them over, but he wasn't going to say up all night and entertain them because he had to get up early—around four
A.M.
—to go to work. So when eight
P.M.
rolled around, Steve would get up and say he was going to bed and he'd go to bed.”

As time went on, the relationship between Kim and Steve seemed to deteriorate even more. Maybe it was because Kim felt that Steve just wasn't outgoing enough for her. But, even so, he was a great husband and father.

“He'd go to work and bring home a paycheck,” Mike said. “He wasn't out drinking. He was a family man. He loved Sarah.”

Although Mike and Steve continued to keep in touch, Kim and Maureen drifted apart.

“Closer to when this [was] happening, I hadn't talked to her for a very long time,” Maureen recalled. “She wasn't coming down with Steve anymore to visit and she wasn't really calling much anymore. It was almost like she was really distancing herself. I think what ended up happening is they started having trouble in the marriage, and she, knowing that Steve and Mike were so close, was very limited in what she was sharing with me, knowing it would probably get back to Steve.”

Then one day in November 1997, out of the blue, Kim called the Millers and told Maureen she wanted to come to Easton for a visit. Maureen thought that was odd because she had asked Kim to visit on several occasions, but she always turned her down. But Maureen was happy that Kim wanted to come to Easton.

“Mike was going to be out of town. He was going home to State College for a turf-grass meeting and he always took the kids with him. I was going to have the house to myself, so I made plans with Kim,” Maureen said.

Several days before she was supposed to arrive, Kim called to tell Maureen that they would be going out with a bunch of her friends because it was a bachelorette party for her friend Jenny, who had grown up in Easton. Maureen soon figured out the real reason Kim contacted her was because she needed a place for all her friends to stay while they were in Easton.

“So they came down for the bachelorette party and that was my first meeting with Brad Winkler,” Maureen said. “Brad came down with Kim and his cousin's fiancée, Jennifer—it was her bachelorette party.”

Maureen had a previous engagement and caught up with the group at a local watering hole around 11:00
P.M.

“Everybody was completely sloshed and most of the people at the party had already left, except Kim, Brad, Jennifer, and a couple of [other people],” Maureen said. “We stayed until one or one-thirty in the morning and visited and then we went back to my house. We played football outside for awhile and then everybody went to bed and in the morning they got up and left.”

Before Kim left that morning, she and Maureen were sitting around the kitchen table catching up.

“You have the perfect life,” Kim said.

“Why do you say that?” Maureen asked, a bit taken aback by her friend's remark.

“Because you have the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect husband.”

“Honey, are you forgetting you and I work almost in the same business—you're a surgical tech, and I'm a drug rep. Our houses are pretty much the same thing and our husbands are pretty much duplicates of each other,” Maureen said. “So why is my life so different from yours?”

“It's hard to explain,” Kim responded.

Maureen couldn't figure out why Kim was saying those things because she had never before compared their lives. Although Maureen thought Kim's comments were a bit strange, she just put them out of her head.

In January the news that Kim had asked Steve for a divorce completely blindsided Maureen, because Kim had never even told Maureen her marriage was in trouble the last time they were together.

But Maureen began putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

“The whole time we were out with Brad at the bachelorette party, he was talking to people about his failed marriage—he had only been married six months and his wife fooled around on him and broke his heart,” Maureen recalled. “And Kim was talking about Brad—not just telling me his story, but going on and on about his story and how if she was only ten years younger . . . and I told her she seemed to be forgetting that she was married.”

At the party Kim couldn't seem to stop talking about Brad. She kept telling Maureen that he was the sweetest guy she had ever met. But Maureen hadn't put two and two together.

“He wasn't a man I would look twice at. I have no idea what she saw in him, but I think she was totally attracted to his personality,” Maureen said. “He really was a nice guy, caring and genuine.”

Around the end of 1997 Kim asked Steve for a divorce. He was devastated. Steve called Mike in January 1998 to tell him Kim had asked for a divorce and he didn't know what to do. He didn't want to lose his wife and daughter. They were everything to him. Steve told Mike he'd do anything to keep his marriage together, including going to counseling.

“I told him early on Maureen and I had gone to counseling and I said it's not that big of a deal. You go to counseling and talk things out and it can't hurt,” Mike remembered.

Mike went to Laurel in January to visit Steve. The friends sat and talked about everything, except Kim and their marriage.

“It seemed like old times. Steve didn't seem upset and he never really brought up the problems in the marriage. It kind of didn't occur to me that he had just called me and said Kim wanted a divorce. I didn't want to pry, either, but it was odd thinking back on it,” Mike said. “Then Kim came back from bringing Sarah home from soccer and she came downstairs and sat on the couch next to Steve. I was on another couch in the corner and Steve was talking and Kim was sitting on the couch next to him. Steve had his arms on the back of the couch and she was kind of nestled in next to him with her hand on his knee. I didn't think anything of it, but after the murder happened, I thought how odd it was that he was all upset about her wanting a divorce and she came in and sat next to him like everything was peachy keen. I think at that time he told me, in his opinion, things were better.”

Steve really did think his marriage was on the right track again. He and Kim were going to counseling together and they were each seeing a counselor one-on-one. In addition, Steve was taking medication for depression. Mike said he never thought his friend was that depressed, although he admitted Steve was under a lot of pressure at work.

“In his situation as a golf-course superintendent, the owners didn't have a lot of money, but they wanted top-rate conditions,” Mike said. “But there's only so much you can do without money. So he was working a lot of hours and he was under a lot of stress. I don't know if that had anything to do with making him depressed, but I know he was looking to better himself and get out of that situation and make the situation better for his family.”

Sometime between the middle of January and the end of that month, Steve called Mike to ask if he had any ideas for romantic things to do for Valentine's Day. Steve told Mike he had talked to the counselor regarding doing something with Kim and the counselor said it was up to Kim to decide if she wanted to do anything.

Mike told Steve about the Valentine's Day weekend getaway at Harbourtowne, which included a murder-mystery dinner-theater production. Steve thought that sounded like a good idea and he set the weekend up.

“Steve talked to Kim's friends about it—I think he told her he was planning this little getaway, but I don't think he told her where it was, because he didn't want to upset her if she didn't want to do it. I think one of her friends told her where they were going,” Mike said. “But she gave him the impression that she was cool with it. Maureen and I offered to watch Sarah for them, but Kim said no, which thinking back on it was odd. As close friends as we were, all they would have to do was zip down to our house in Easton, drop Sarah off, and then go out to the resort. But she didn't want to do that. She was either going to leave Sarah with a friend in Laurel, or her mother would travel to Laurel to watch her.”

Kim and Maureen made all the funeral arrangements and purchased a cemetery plot on Tuesday, but the fighting with the Hrickos over the disposition of Steve's body continued. They insisted they didn't want him cremated—according to their religion, he wouldn't be able to be buried in consecrated ground then.

“It was a nasty scene,” Maureen said. “The Hrickos were upset, understandably so, and they were fighting tooth and nail on every decision Kim made because it went against their faith. But Kim didn't care and kept saying that was the way it was going to be. And now we all know why she was doing it. And there I was thinking she was telling me the truth.”

While Kim and Maureen were making arrangements with the funeral director, something else happened that Maureen thought was a bit odd.

“We had to talk about how we were going to pay for this thing, and after I had talked to the funeral director, I told Kim that it was going to be expensive and asked her how she was going to pay for it,” Maureen recalled. “I asked her if she had life insurance on Steve and she said there was a life insurance policy. I asked her if she knew where it was, because I don't know where our policies are, and she said it was in the dining room.”

Maureen asked Kim what it was doing there and Kim told her it was sitting in a cardboard box in the corner of the room. Kim explained that she had taken it out for some reason a couple of weeks earlier and hadn't had time to put it back yet. So Maureen went into the dining room, located the box, and opened it.

“The life insurance policy was laying on top of all the paperwork,” Maureen said. “And I'm thinking this is the weirdest thing—that she would know right off where the policy was. That was one of the other red flags that went off.”

After spending two days with Kim, Maureen finally told her that she needed to get home to her husband. She told the Hrickos she was going to send Kim to State College and they could continue to fight over the funeral arrangements when she got there.

So on Tuesday, Maureen sent Kim, her mother, and Sarah to State College to stay with the Hrickos; then she went home. Once there, Maureen asked Mike what he knew about the events leading up to Steve's death. Mike told Maureen what he had learned from police and others at Harbourtowne.

“He said Kim told police that they had gone to the dinner theater, where they drank beer and wine. Kim told police Steve had taken his antidepressants, as well as some muscle relaxant, because his back was bothering him. When they got back to their room, they got in a fight and Kim stormed off and Steve lit a cigar and had fallen asleep,” Maureen said. “Mike said they had found a
Playboy
next to him. So we figured that he and Kim argued because he had taken a
Playboy
with him to Harbourtowne.”

The Millers speculated the
Playboy
was the cause of Kim and Steve's argument because they knew how much Kim hated pornography.

“When they were living in Hollidaysburg, Kim ran across a collection of
Playboy
magazines Steve had from when he was a teenager, probably from his father. They were very old—probably collectibles. Well, she came across them in the bottom of a closet in their house in Hollidaysburg and she flipped out,” Maureen remembered. “We happened to be visiting that weekend and she was still very upset about it. And she discussed the argument over the
Playboy
s with me. Kim had a very religious upbringing and she abhorred pornography and thought it was absolutely abhorrent that any man would possess it. And what did that make her feel like if he was going and looking at the big, bodacious women in the magazine and then coming and making love to her? It was so insulting to her that she told him that if she ever, ever saw a
Playboy
in their house again, their marriage was over.”

So when Mike told Maureen that there was a
Playboy
found near Steve, another red flag went up. Maureen started thinking that something was wrong because it just seemed too obvious that there was a
Playboy
in the Hrickos' room.

“I knew that Steve would never, in a million years, have taken a
Playboy
on his romantic getaway weekend to save his marriage,” Maureen said. “I knew about how she felt about it and I knew the ultimatum that she had given him.”

That was the first time Maureen started thinking that something just wasn't right. But she decided to take the advice she had given to her husband—stop trying to make sense out of nonsense.

While the Millers were packing and getting ready to head to State College on Wednesday, Maureen called the Hrickos to see how things were going and to check on Kim. Maureen was shocked to hear that Kim was nowhere to be found. The Hrickos told Maureen that the last they had heard, Kim and her best friend, Rachelle St. Phard, were planning to go back down to St. Michaels and Harbourtowne because Kim said she needed to be with Steve. Maureen told the Hrickos that Kim should stay away because the media were swarming all over Harbourtowne.

“But they said, ‘She's on her way and you can't stop her, we tried,'” Maureen said.

In the meantime Kim called Maureen, who quickly told her not to go to the resort. But Kim was determined and insisted that she was going, no matter what. Maureen told Kim she was going to call her husband at work at Harbourtowne and she'd call Kim back. Maureen explained to Mike that Kim was dead set on going to St. Michaels.

“Mike said to tell her to go to the maintenance shop and he'd keep her there until it got dark and then he'd take her down to the water,” Maureen said.

Kim agreed and she and Rachelle drove to Harbourtowne to meet Mike.

 

 

Rachelle St. Phard met Kim Aungst when she was in ninth grade and Kim was in tenth grade.

“I ended up at the school she was attending, Calvary Baptist Christian Academy in Altoona, Pennsylvania,” Rachelle said. “I knew her vaguely, but we really weren't friends until we went bowling one night and we kind of started playing jokes on one another. That was the beginning of our friendship—we really just clicked. We'd spend nights in one another's houses. We played basketball and soccer and softball and we were cheerleaders. Her parents were divorced when I met her. She was pretty young, around four, when they got divorced. She lived with her mom and stepfather. Her last name was Aungst—her dad's name. He lived about fifteen or twenty minutes from Hollidaysburg, where she lived. I lived in Altoona, about fifteen or twenty minutes away. She had one brother, a half brother, who was younger than her.”

Rachelle said Kim was very friendly and very outgoing. She was someone who liked to joke around and have fun, even though she had a pretty strict upbringing—they both did.

“We weren't allowed to do a whole lot of stuff. In some respects her mom and stepdad let her do a few more things than I was allowed to do, but there were things that weren't allowed in her house,” Rachelle said. “Her stepdad put a lot of weird restrictions on things. One example sticks in my head. She was only allowed to use the iron once a week. If she didn't have all her clothes ironed at that point, she wasn't allowed to go get the iron again. He wasn't very kind back then. [Now] he's a different person and a more kind person than he was back then. Her mom, she tried. She did her best to raise the kids in the best way she saw fit. I think Kim was slighted in her house, more so than her brother, because her brother was her stepdad's natural child. He was definitely favored more.”

Rachelle and Kim remained friends through college, although they didn't go to the same school. Rachelle went to the University of Pittsburgh and Kim's first year of college was spent majoring in communications at Messiah College, a Christian college in Grantham, Pennsylvania. When Kim came home for the weekend, she often stayed at Rachelle's house rather than her own.

“I think because of her stepfather's interesting rules, she chose to come to my house,” Rachelle said. “She really was like a part of our family. My mom and dad were real close with her and she took family vacations with us.”

After her freshman year Kim decided to enroll at the Altoona branch of Pennsylvania State University. After a year there she transferred to Penn State's main campus in University Park and continued majoring in communications, Rachelle said.

When Kim met Steve, Rachelle was living outside Philadelphia. Kim called Rachelle and told her that she was pregnant.

“But I didn't even know she had been dating anyone,” Rachelle said. “She felt pretty strongly that Steve was the one. She wanted to spend her life with him and have a home with their child. When she met Steve and they had Sarah, she hadn't finished school, so later she decided to pursue a health career and she enrolled in a local college that offered a surgical technologist program.”

Rachelle said although she didn't know a whole lot about Kim's marriage, she did have some concerns about their relationship.

“Steve was not the most outgoing of people,” Rachelle said. “I sensed that there were issues. I wrote her a couple of letters asking if everything was okay because it just felt weird throughout the marriage. He wasn't particularly my cup of tea. Maybe it was because he was so introverted and I tend to be more outgoing as well. The few times I did visit them when they were married, I didn't see much of him because he was holed up in their basement working out, or watching TV, or whatever, but I really didn't see a whole lot of him.”

Rachelle said shortly before Steve died, Kim called her and whispered into the telephone that she wanted to get a divorce. But she couldn't elaborate because Steve was nearby. Rachelle said she found out about Steve's death from Maureen O'Toole-Miller.

“Maureen called me and told me that he had died in a hotel fire and that Kim was okay,” Rachelle said. “So I told my husband I have to go. I called Maureen back and she told me Kim was going to State College to the Hrickos and I packed up my stuff and went and stayed with my mother in Altoona. Then I went to the Hrickos' house and hung out with her. She was pretty numb. She didn't really say a whole lot. She definitely cried, but numb is the best word to describe it.”

Rachelle said Kim told her all the details surrounding Steve's death and she believed her.

“I didn't have any reason to believe otherwise,” Rachelle said.

 

 

When Kim said she wanted to go back to St. Michaels the day before Steve's viewing, Rachelle wasn't comfortable letting Kim go back by herself. She was afraid Kim would take her own life.

“So I went with her,” Rachelle said.

Rachelle said the first thing Kim did when they got to Harbourtowne was to go to room 506. Kim got out of the car, but Rachelle didn't go with her.

“She wanted to go back to the room to see where he had died, because they got her out of there so fast that night,” Rachelle said. “She might have picked up some rocks or something to take back with her. Then she got back into the car and we went to see Mike Miller. The TV was on in the shop and there was a report about her possibly being a suspect and we talked about how crazy it was. That's the first I knew they were looking at her.”

When night fell, Mike drove Kim back to the water's edge behind the cottage where Steve had died. Mike didn't know that Kim had already been to the room when she first arrived. When she got to the water, she told Mike she wanted to be alone. She got out of the car and walked along the riprap next to the water and then walked back again, all the time looking at the ground.

“Mike's watching her and he's thinking this is so freaking weird and he's trying to keep her hidden so nobody will see her,” Maureen recalled.

Then Kim and Rachelle drove to Kim's town house in Laurel.

“I had a three-month-old baby at the time, who was at my sister's house, and I needed to get back to him, but Kim wanted to spend the night at the house,” Rachelle recalled. “I was uncomfortable leaving her there alone, so I made her swear and promise that, for me, she wouldn't do anything to herself because I couldn't live with myself for leaving her there if she did. I don't know if that was what saved her at that point or not.”

Rachelle went back to Pennsylvania that evening. The next morning, Thursday, Kim headed back to State College.

Mike and Maureen drove to State College on Thursday morning, the day of Steve's viewing, and went straight to Mike's parents' home. When she arrived, the first thing Maureen did was telephone Kim, who was at the Hrickos' house.

“I told her I'd pick her up and we'd go over to the viewing early, just her and I. And she said, ‘I'd like that,'” Maureen said.

Later that afternoon as Maureen was getting ready for the viewing, she turned on the TV and started watching the local news. Soon the station started reporting a story about Steve's death—but as a homicide, not an accident.

Infuriated, Maureen called the state police investigator in Easton to find out what was going on, but he wouldn't give her any information. She then called the TV station and demanded to talk to the reporter, who explained that his information that Steve was murdered came from the Maryland State Police.

“I said, ‘You better make damn sure this is correct because we're going to sue you,'” Maureen said. “This is an hour before Steve's viewing. I was so flabbergasted that they would have the balls to lie and say it was a murder an hour before people were showing up for his viewing and they're all going to be looking at Kim and wondering if she did it. The timing of it was really bad.”

Trying to put the news story out of her mind, Maureen picked Kim up at the Hrickos' and took her to the viewing at the Koch Funeral Home.