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On Valentine's Day night, 1998, at the tackily faux-Anglophile-named Harbourtowne golf resort on Maryland's Eastern Shore, there was a fire. Stephen Hricko, a 35-year-old golf course maintainer, husband, and father of one, burned to death in his room. His wife, hospital worker Kimberly Hricko, escaped the same fate because she was driving around Maryland getting lost trying to find a friend's house after the couple had had a fight -- she claimed. The hotel had been providing synthetic logs for guests to use in the wood-burning stoves that apparently were the rooms' only sources of heat, despite the log-manufacturing companies' warnings that their logs should never, in any fashion, be used in wood-burning stoves. However, this serious safety violation wasn't the cause of Steve Hricko's death. When the dust settled, ashes were combed, and the couple's friends and co-workers were interviewed, Kimberly Hricko was found to have been planning to kill her husband, buying combustible props for the 'accident' scene, telling friends that she planned to kill him, taking out lucrative insurance policies on his life, and having a rather sad affair with a noncommittal 22-year-old soldier in the Marines. Not a very smart murderer, she put together a hellish crime scene, but had to tell everyone how cleverly she'd done it, in advance. She was charged with murder and arson, convicted, and is now serving a very long prison sentence. This is the 'true story' of the crime, investigation, and trial, luridly described by BOSTON GLOBE reporter Linda Rosencrance. You know it's a tale of truly universal human interest because a banner on the cover blazes "Case featured in People magazine!" So if you didn't get enough Hrickos horror from People and the rest of the media saturation, you can read this book. Rosencrance's work is detail-heavy. For those true sceptics out there, she even provides truly gruesome photos of Stephen Hricko's charred and rigor-tightened corpse in the Harbourtowne room. She also admirably gives space to views that she clearly does not share, interviewing two women who continue to insist that Kimberly Hricko is innocent: a childhood friend and a real estate agent who was briefly acquainted with the Hrickos through her work, and then sunk tens of thousands of dollars of her personal money into an attempt to exonerate Mrs Hricko. Rosencrance deconstructs, and basically destructs, these backbenchers' arguments, but she does give them their say. The title of the book refers to an 'act of murder' played at Harbourtowne in the hours before the fatal fire. Ironically, Stephen Hrickos had taken his wife to the resort to repair their relationship. Before the freezing February night in the fake-wood-heated hotel room, the couple attended Harbourtowne's in-house dinner theatre, where the evening's entertainment was an audience-participation murder mystery, The Bride Who Cried, by Bobbi Benitz. Rosencrance points out the irony, yet carefully notes that it was entirely coincidental. It's great to see the work of women playwrights acknowledged -- thank you, Ms Rosencrance. As AN ACT OF MURDER shows, you can't underestimate what elements of reality are actually theatre -- logs that are fatal when treated as wood is a case in point -- and mixing up the two can be life-threatening.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, September 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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