An Act Of Murder by Linda Rosencrance

State.
    While Mike was away at Allegheny College, Steve stayed at Penn State and continued working at the golf courses. In the early 1980s Steve enrolled in the Penn State Turf Grass Manager program, a training program for golf course superintendents. From 1987 to 1989 Mike tried to make a living doing freelance photography for a local newspaper in State College, and also working for a local company doing graphics work, but he eventually decided that wasn’t the career he really wanted. Mike talked to Steve about his future and Steve convinced him to enroll in Penn State’s Turf Grass program.
    â€œHe said if he could get through the turf grass program, any dummy can get through it,” Mike said. “But he was a little brighter and he understood all that scientific stuff.”
    However, Maureen and Mike—who married in June 1989—talked it over and he decided to go for it. Mike entered the two-year program in September 1989.
    Maureen met Kim Aungst in 1988 while she was going to college and working as a waitress at a Hoss’s Steak and Sea House in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Maureen was twenty-three and Kim was twenty.
    â€œI actually didn’t have a whole lot of interaction with her until her cat died one day and she was very upset and hysterical and I tried to help her out,” Maureen recalled. “And I took her home because she was just too upset and we became friends from that point.”
    Kim had been attending college, but really never took it seriously, so at that point she was working full-time with the intention of going back to school, but she never did, Maureen said.
    â€œShe was quite the partyer,” Maureen said.
    Soon Maureen and Kim, who was also a waitress at the restaurant, started going out together after work.
    â€œWe started spending a lot more time together,” Maureen said. “I was dating Michael at the time and she was just in one bad relationship after another—she’d fall madly in love with somebody and they’d just treat her like crap. I think it was probably because she was meeting them in the wrong places. She was kind of looking for a nice relationship, so we fixed her up with one of Mike’s friends, Steve Hricko.”
    Maureen and Mike figured that Steve and Kim would either really, really like each other, or really, really hate each other. They were complete opposites—Kim loved to party and socialize, Steve kept pretty much to himself. He wasn’t really very outgoing, nor was he someone who would walk into a room and light it up with his presence. People would notice him because of his size and stature, but he wasn’t the type of person who would make a grand entrance into a room. How their relationship fared depended on how much Kim really wanted to straighten her life out.
    â€œIf she really wanted a serious relationship, then she was going to have to mature a little bit,” Maureen said.
    Steve and Kim started dating around the middle of 1988. They had been dating for four or five months when she got pregnant. Steve did the right thing and asked her to marry him. They decided to have their wedding in March 1989.
    â€œHe was head over heels in love with her. There was no question about it, and she was in love with him,” Maureen recalled. “However, I think if the relationship was allowed to take its own course, I don’t know if he would have married her, only because at that time Kim was trying to mature. She was trying to straighten out her life and I don’t know whether or not that was something she was truly going to end up doing.”
    When Maureen found out that Kim and Steve were going to get married, she was just about finished making arrangements for her June marriage to Mike, so she told Kim she’d help her plan her wedding.
    â€œI had the thing planned from beginning to end in three days,” Maureen remembered. “I made all the phone calls—I did mostly everything