An Act Of Murder by Linda Rosencrance Page B

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    â€œHe was big and macho, but he even let Sarah put makeup on him,” Maureen said. “They’d play games and at one point he even said he could really get into being a full-time dad all the time.”
    But when Kim graduated from school, the Hrickos ended up leaving State College and moving to the Baltimore area, where Steve took a job as an assistant superintendent at Sparrows Point Country Club in Dundalk, Maryland. After the Hrickos moved, the Millers, who were living in New Jersey, started seeing less and less of Steve and Kim, but they would get together when they could. Steve and Mike, however, always stayed in touch.
    When Mike got a job at Harbourtowne as the golf-course superintendent and the Millers moved to Easton, they would sometimes spend the weekends with the Hrickos.
    â€œKim and I stayed friends with the girl she roomed with in college—Rachel McCoy,” Maureen said. “Kim stayed in touch with Rachel because she was in the Baltimore area and had married a distant cousin of Kim’s. So they spent a lot of time with each other when Kim was living in Dundalk because they were both living and working in the Baltimore area. And they had become closer friends than Kim and I were at the time.”
    During this time Mike and Steve would get together occasionally to play golf while Maureen stayed at the Hrickos’ house visiting with Kim.
    â€œEverything seemed to be good in their marriage,” Mike said. “He never said at that time that there was anything different. But sometimes Kim would get a little perturbed with him when he would go out and stay out late, but we didn’t stay out that late. Steve was a homebody. He wasn’t one to go out and get liquored up and raise Cain, or anything like that. But he liked to go out and have an occasional beer with the guys, play a little golf, that kind of thing.”
    In June 1995 Steve got a job as the golf superintendent at Patuxent Greens and the Hrickos moved to Laurel, Maryland, where the course was located. Although Laurel was only about seventy minutes away from the Millers’ home in Easton, the couples rarely got together.
    â€œOur two kids and Sarah were getting older, and as we got more involved with our kids, we didn’t see them as much because Maureen and I were both working and it got a little more difficult to spend time with each other,” Mike said. “But Steve and I talked on the phone at least three or four times a week— he’d call me about something in the business, or he’d call me about whatever, and we’d talk from ten to fifteen minutes to an hour depending on what we were talking about.”
    Mike also would see Steve when he traveled to Baltimore to attend work-related seminars. And sometimes Steve would drive to Easton to play golf with Mike.
    â€œKim wouldn’t always come along,” Mike said. “It got to a point where we weren’t seeing or hearing a lot from Kim. I remember Maureen saying she had tried to keep in touch with Kim, but Kim wasn’t returning her calls. So Maureen said if Kim didn’t want to keep in touch with her, she wasn’t going to keep wasting her time trying to get a hold of her. She’d call and leave messages and Kim wouldn’t call back.”
    Even though Kim was distancing herself from the Millers, Steve never gave Mike any indication that anything was wrong with his marriage.
    But in the winter of 1997, Mike discovered that the Hrickos were having some serious problems.
    â€œFrom my perspective it happened really fast,” Mike said. “I don’t think Steve even realized how bad things were until Kim asked him for a divorce. Around wintertime Steve called me and said Kim wanted a divorce. He was very upset. I don’t ever recall Steve being that upset, to the point of crying.”
    Part of the problem centered around the personality differences between Kim, who was a very outgoing