An Act Of Murder (19 page)

“Welfare fraud involved applying for benefits from the state, filling out an application under oath, is that right?” Brennan asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You lied under oath in 1985, isn't that right, Mr. Burgess?”

“I suppose so, sir.”

“You lied under oath to get money from the state that you were not entitled to,” Brennan said.

“No, sir.”

“So you didn't lie to solve financial problems, you lied for the fun of it?”

“I lied to put food on the table for my kids,” Burgess responded.

“You're always having financial problems. Okay. And you heard about the death of Ms. Hricko's husband and realized it could be an opportunity for you to make some money and solve your financial problems, isn't that right, Mr. Burgess?” Brennan asked.

“It's entirely wrong,” Burgess said.

“All right. At Washington, at Shady Grove Hospital in Rockville, haven't you had conversations with your coworkers over there about contact with tabloid-news organizations about selling your story?”

“No, sir. I have not. I've had conversations at my new job about the situation, but never about selling my story,” Burgess responded.

The witness who probably did the most damage to Kim's defense that day was Jennifer Gowen, who said she learned about Kim's affair with Brad Winkler, her husband Sean's cousin, shortly after she returned from her honeymoon in December 1997.

“She told me they were having sex and that she was becoming more and more dissatisfied with her marriage to Steve,” Gowen said on direct examination. “She expressed that she was interested in getting a divorce from Steve. Then she became more and more negative in her comments about Steve.”

“What negative comments did she tell you?” Dean asked Gowen.

“She told me he repulsed her and that she didn't want to be with him anymore. That she wanted to leave him, to get a divorce,” Gowen testified. “She talked a lot about Brad and gave me quite a lot of details about their intimate contact and that she was happy with what was going on with Brad.”

Gowen said Kimberly told her Brad treated her the way a woman should be treated and that she could open up more to him than she could with Steve.

“She told me that at one point in those several weeks after I got back from my honeymoon that she had had sex with Steve once and that it made her want to throw up, and that was the one time she'd had it in quite some time,” Gowen told the jurors, adding that as December turned into January, Kim's comments about Steve become increasingly negative.

“And as we go into January, what is she now telling you about Steve?” Dean asked.

“She continues in a very negative vein,” Gowen replied. “She tells me that she would like to kill him.”

“Did she ever talk to you about a way in which she would kill Steve?”

“At one point [in January] she mentioned Sodium Pentothal, which is an anesthetic agent,” Gowen said. “We had a discussion about a case history where a woman had injected some children with succinylcholine and that was a muscle-relaxing anesthesia agent and that it would go untraced.”

Gowen told the jurors Kim wanted her support even if she killed Steve.

“She mentioned to me that her brother would support her even if she killed someone and she was asking me for support,” Gowen said. “She did tell me that if I killed someone, that she would support me.”

Gowen said one day shortly before Steve's death, Kimberly told her that if she could kill Steve and get away with it, she'd do it the very next day.

After Kim was arrested, Gowen visited her in jail and said she had a lot of questions for her about Steve's death.

“Did you have any questions to her about money?” Dean asked.

“Kim said, ‘I don't care what anyone says, it wasn't for the money,'” Gowen testified.

Brad Winkler also testified on Wednesday, telling jurors about his affair with Kim. Winkler told jurors that Kim never talked to him about wanting to kill Steve. He said he was shocked when his cousin Sean Gowen told him Stephen Hricko was dead.

Kim's friend Norma Walz testified that Kim told her she was falling in love with Brad Winkler and that she was going to ask Steve for a divorce.

“She told me she had asked Steve for a divorce and that he had broken down and cried and begged her for a second chance,” Walz said. “She said that she gave him a week to see if he could get into a doctor and at least show that he was trying to turn himself around.”

“Did she at any point complain to you about Steve and his actions toward her after that?” Dean asked.

“She made a comment that ‘he's smothering me and following me around the house like a puppy dog,'” Walz responded.

Jurors also heard about the $450,000 worth of life insurance Kim stood to collect when Steve died. And a doctor, who had treated Steve for poison ivy in 1996, testified that Steve also wanted to go on the nicotine patch so he could stop chewing tobacco. The doctor said when Steve filled out a medical history form he indicated that he smoked zero packs of cigarettes per day, but he chewed tobacco and rarely drank alcohol.

Teri Armstrong, Kim's friend and former neighbor, was the first to testify on Thursday, the fourth day of the trial. Armstrong told the jurors that shortly before Steve died, Kim told her she wanted out of her marriage and that she had even been thinking of different ways to kill him.

“I asked her, ‘What would you get out of it?' and she said ‘Well, the insurance money,' so her and Sarah can live their life the way they want, the way she wanted to live her life,” Armstrong told the jurors.

Armstrong said she stayed at the Hrickos' house on February 13, 1998, the Friday before they left to go to Harbourtowne.

“[Kim] told me that Stephen made plans to go to a resort and to see a play and they weren't leaving until the next day,” Armstrong testified. “She was not looking forward to it.”

Armstrong told the jury that after Kim was arrested, she told Armstrong she was feeling a lot of remorse about Steve's death.

The next witness was Dr. David Fowler, the deputy chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland. Fowler testified about his efforts to determine how Steve died.

“The initial case did not seem to be terribly suspicious and so I ran the confirmatory tests and they came back negative for the products of combustion in the bloodstream,” he said.

Those products would confirm death in a fire, he said. A normal level of carbon monoxide in a person's blood is between 0 percent and 10 percent, Fowler explained to the jurors. For someone who died in a fire that level would be 50 percent or higher. However, if a young child or an elderly person died in a fire, the carbon monoxide level would be slightly lower—about 30 to 40 percent, he said.

There was no carbon monoxide in Steve Hricko's blood, so he didn't die in the fire, Fowler told jurors.

“In fact, the only conclusion from that particular result is that the individual was dead before the fire actually reached him,” Fowler said. “This man did not breathe any of the products of combustion of that fire, i.e., was dead, not breathing, at the time of the fire.”

Although Steve's face and upper body were severely burned and charred and there was a lot of soot covering most of the front of his body, there was no soot in his nose, mouth, trachea, windpipe, or lungs, Fowler said.

“If the body was breathing at the time of the fire, would you expect to find soot?” Dean asked.

“Oh, absolutely. In fact, in very large quantities, given the amount of soot on the outside of the body,” Fowler told jurors. “And as far as I was concerned, this merely confirmed the result that I had received from the laboratory that the person was not breathing at the time the fire was, in fact, going on.”

Fowler said that after further examining Steve's body, he didn't find any abnormalities in any of his organs or in his brain.

“So I saw at the time I'd finished the autopsy, [there was] no physical reason that I could identify for this man to have died,” he told jurors. “But now I'm beginning to wonder whether or not there's a chemical reason. Alcohol, drugs, such as street drugs, or an overdose, a suicide, what else could be going on here? Is there, in fact, a chemical reason for his death?”

At this point Fowler said he voided the death certificate he had signed earlier listing the cause of death as smoke inhalation because it was no longer correct within a medical degree of certainty.

Findings from the toxicology laboratory showed there were therapeutic amounts of a decongestant and an antihistamine found in over-the-counter cold medications, as well as therapeutic amounts of the antidepressant Effexor, Fowler told the jury.

However, the tests indicated there was no alcohol in Steve's bloodstream. The blood alcohol level was 0.00, he said. That result concerned Fowler because he had received information that Steve had been drinking heavily right before he died and because police found a number of partially full, or empty, bottles of alcohol in the Hrickos' room at Harbourtowne. So Fowler asked the lab to test three more samples. All four samples came back negative for alcohol.

Now Fowler's suspicions were heightened even more.

“The evidence that I have now obtained in the way of the cause of death, the alcohol levels, and everything else are totally contrary to the actual scene evidence, nothing is absolute, nothing is fitting together,” he told the jury. “I have a person who's allegedly drunk, but he's not drunk. I have a person who allegedly dies because of a fire. He did not die because of the fire. He was dead before the fire. And there is no physical reason for him to have died. I also have no drug levels. I don't have heroin or cocaine or anything else that I can blame it on. I don't have an overdose of medications. I have nothing from the obvious chemical analysis to explain this person's death.”

Because Steve was a golf superintendent, Fowler also considered environmental hazards, including insecticides and pesticides. He said he had narrowed those down to a small class of pesticides known as organic phosphates that could kill a person quickly, but would not cause obvious symptoms. However, Fowler said if Stephen Hricko had been exposed to organic phosphates, there would have been an elevated level of pseudocholinesterase in his blood. That wasn't the case, Fowler told the jury.

After ruling out other pesticides, such as rat poison and certain weed killers, Fowler said he began to look at paralyzing agents used by anesthesiologists that were available in operating rooms.

“The two which really concerned me would be the neuromuscular blocking agents or muscle-paralysis agents, which are used during operations or surgical procedures,” Fowler testified. “There are two different groups of drugs—one which is based on curare, which is a poison derived from South America, and now they've made multiple different artificial forms of that. That is a long-acting muscle-paralytic agent. It takes several minutes, in fact, to achieve its activity. Completely paralyzes all the muscles when given properly. Lasts for hours and requires an antidote to revive the person and give them their muscle activity back.”

Fowler said curare was easy to detect in the bloodstream. It was not present in Steve's blood, he said.

“The other substance which concerned me was succinylcholine,” he said. “It's only found in operating rooms. It's a drug which causes very, very rapid paralysis of all skeletal muscles, which involves also the chest muscles (so a person couldn't breathe).... It acts within seconds if it's given intravenously and usually will actually begin to wear off within two to four minutes.”

Fowler said succinylcholine could also be given intramuscularly with a hypodermic syringe. Fowler said he examined the outside of Steve's body for a small puncture hole, but didn't find one. He said because those needles were so sharp and fine, it was often difficult to detect a puncture hole. Trying to find one on Steve's corpse was even more difficult because he had been severely burned on the upper portion of his body. Fowler said trying to find the needle mark on Steve was worse then trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack.

Even so, Fowler said he tried to detect the presence of succinylcholine in Steve's body, but he was unable to because it had been broken down and removed by a natural substance that was present in the body. Succinylcholine usually wears off naturally within about four minutes. Fowler said the drug, combined with the heat from the fire, might have hastened rigor mortis in Steve's body.

“And so this is a substance that our body will destroy in about four minutes,” Fowler said.

During questioning, Dean directed Fowler's attention to a photograph of Steve's body and asked him to look specifically at the position of Steve's left arm, which was crooked and bent up at the elbow.

“Is that consistent with death by succinylcholine?” Dean asked.

“That is consistent with death,” Fowler responded.

Fowler said the position of Steve's arm was the result of rigor mortis, which meant his muscles had stiffened after he died.

“Muscles do not contract [after death],” he said. “They will simply fix in the position in which they were at the time of death. Eventually the body begins to decompose and break down . . . and the person will become floppy again.”

In the small muscles, such as the arm muscles, Fowler said, it takes between three and six hours for rigor to set in. Fowler also said fire could accelerate the onset of rigor.

“Would the introduction of a paralyzing agent in any way hasten, or could it in any way hasten, the onset of rigor?” Dean asked the medical examiner.

“In theory, yes, it could,” Fowler replied. “In my opinion it would probably push the person into rigor sooner.”

Dean asked Fowler if he had an opinion as to Steve's cause of death.

“In my opinion he died of probable poisoning, although we could not confirm the agent,” he replied.

“And were you able to reach an opinion to a reasonable degree of forensic and scientific certainty as to the manner of death?” Dean asked.

“Yes.”

“What is that, sir?”

“Homicide.”

On cross-examination Brennan asked Fowler if he found any evidence that there was a needle puncture in the layer of skin and muscle under Steve's charred skin. Fowler responded that the only way to determine that would have been to skin Steve. But he said he never skinned anyone during an autopsy.

“That would have been a mutilating and . . . an unethical procedure to go to those lengths to do,” Fowler said.

When asked by Brennan if Steve could have died in a “flash fire,” in which case his carbon monoxide levels might be normal, the medical examiner said no, because the heat would have injured the lining of his mouth, his tongue, and his upper airway. But Fowler said Steve didn't have any of those injuries.

Brennan then questioned Fowler about an EKG, done on Steve on January 15, 1998, exactly a month before he died. Fowler said Steve's doctor had circled “normal” on the summary sheet of the EKG, but also indicated small “q” waves. The presence of a “q” wave in some people is an indication of a myocardial infarction, or heart attack. Fowler said Steve should have been referred for a stress EKG. Brennan said Steve's doctor did refer him to another doctor for the stress test, but Steve didn't keep the appointment.

Fowler said he wouldn't have altered his findings despite the indication of the small “q” waves, because he had personally examined Steve's heart and coronary arteries and they were of normal size and did not have any defects in them.

“And the other thing which is also very important, his heart was of entirely normal weight,” Fowler said. “Anybody who has any disease process going on in their heart for any significant period, the heart is certainly going to enlarge to compensate and is going to begin to change.”

Marc LeBeau, a forensic chemist and toxicologist for the FBI laboratory, was the next witness for the prosecution. LeBeau testified that the medical examiner's office sent him samples of Stephen Hricko's blood and urine to test for the presence of succinylcholine. He said he didn't detect any succinylcholine in either Steve's blood or urine.

The witness told the jury that succinylcholine was a very dangerous, fast-acting muscle relaxant that not only relaxed the muscles used to move around, such as arms and legs, but it also affected other muscles, such as those needed to breathe. LeBeau said the drug was dangerous if not administered in a hospital setting because it caused the body to suffocate itself. He said typically the drug started working about fifteen to thirty seconds after it was injected intramuscularly. LeBeau said the body rapidly broke down succinylcholine into two compounds, succinic acid and choline, both of which were normally found in the body, even if a person had not been exposed to the drug.

“Within a few minutes you may not be able to detect succinylcholine in a blood specimen,” he said, adding a person could test for choline and succinic acid and find them.

To test for the presence of succinylcholine in the samples of Steve's urine and blood, LeBeau used a fairly new technique, known as liquid chromatography, that allowed him to try to look for a chemical based on its molecular weight. Testing Steve's urine was simple. LeBeau said all he had to do was shoot the urine into the instrument and monitor for the presence of succinylcholine. But before putting the blood in the instrument, he had to clean it up first.

“Well, if the succinylcholine breaks down in the body, what were you trying to find in the urine and blood?” Dean asked.

“Well, there have been a number of papers that suggest that really your only chance at finding succinylcholine in a forensic specimen or a postmortem specimen is in the urine. Only about two to five percent of the injected succinylcholine actually gets into the urine without breaking down into succinic acid and choline. Only about two to five percent. So you have a little bit of a chance to find it in the urine versus the blood, [where] it's very rapidly hydrolyzed into those two components.”

LeBeau also told the jury that the chance of finding succinylcholine in the urine decreases the longer a person has been dead. He said that was because the enzymes that break the succinylcholine down into succinic acid and choline still exist. He said although there had been some success detecting a small amount of the drug in the urine of living patients, the likelihood of finding it in the urine taken from a dead person was slim.

Steve's sister Jennifer Hricko testified next. Jennifer told the jury that over the years she had never seen her brother with a pipe, cigarette, or cigar in his mouth.

On direct examination Dean asked Jennifer if she ever talked to Kim about her plans for Steve's funeral. Jennifer said on Monday, February 16, she discussed Steve's funeral with Kim while they were at Jennifer's parents' house in State College. The only substantial issue, as far as Kim was concerned, was cremation. She said her plan and desire was to have Steve cremated, Jennifer said. The next day Jennifer also questioned Kim about Steve's funeral arrangements and again Kim said she didn't really care about the arrangements and would leave it up to the Hrickos. The only thing that did matter was that Steve had to be cremated. Later, Jenny, who was living two miles from her parents, picked Kim up at the senior Hrickos' house to take her to talk to the funeral director, because the medical examiner had not yet released Steve's body for cremation.