A Murder Not-So-Mystery Weekend in St. Michaels, Maryland

Stephen Ricco was born on November 22nd, 1962 and grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. In the seventh grade he became best friends with Mike Miller, and the friendship lasted through Penn State, where both men studied the maintenance of golf courses. details of the account remain covered until revealed Kim had had a difficult childhood after her parents divorced and her stepfather was abusive, but friends described her as outgoing and sociable. She and Stephen hit it off on a double date, and they married in March 1989 when both were about twenty-two. Mike was best man and Maureen was maid of honour. Their daughter Anna was born in 1990, and when Mike and Maureen married, Stephen and Kim stood up for them in return.

Stephen became a golf course superintendent, working in western Pennsylvania, in Dundalk, Maryland, and from the early 1990s at Patuxent Greens near Laurel, Maryland. Mike took a job at the Harbourtown golf course in St Michaels, Maryland, in October 1993, so both families were living in Maryland. Kim trained as a surgical technologist and from 1995 worked in the operating room at Holy Cross Hospital. Part of her job was disposing of unused medicines and drugs after operations. In 1996 the Riccos bought a $200,000 life insurance policy.

By 1997 the marriage was in trouble. Kim told friends she was unhappy, that there was verbal abuse, that Stephen did nothing around the house and did not like going out. She asked him to go to counselling in the summer of 1997. In September or October she told Rachel McCoy, a college friend, that she had been looking into a divorce. That November she was maid of honour at the wedding of her co-worker Jennifer Gowen, and the wedding brought Jennifer's twenty-three-year-old cousin Brad Winkler to town. Brad was a Marine sergeant assigned to the Pentagon. He and Kim began an affair during the wedding week, first at Jennifer's townhouse while Jennifer was on honeymoon and then at his aunt's house. Kim told several friends about it, including Rachel McCoy, Theresa Armstrong and Norma, and said it was about sex rather than marriage.

In December 1997 Kim approached Kenneth Burgess, a surgical technologist at Holy Cross, and asked him to kill her husband. She offered fifty thousand dollars and asked whether he knew anyone else who would do it. Burgess refused and told her to get a divorce. On New Year's Eve she told Theresa Armstrong that she had thought about killing Stephen, and that the insurance money of as much as four hundred and fifty thousand dollars from two policies would let her and Anna live the way they wanted. In January she told Jennifer Gowen that if she could kill Steve and get away with it she would do it tomorrow. She also worried that a divorce would let Stephen take Anna or turn her against her mother, and argued that Stephen would be better off dead.

On the night of January 30th, 1998, Rachel McCoy came home to five or six increasingly frantic messages from Kim. She drove to the Ricco house in Laurel and found Kim drunk and distraught. Kim said she had a plan: she would inject Stephen with a drug that would paralyse him and stop his breathing, then set the curtains alight with a candle or cigar so that he died of smoke inhalation and nobody would know. She said she could get the drug easily at work, that it was in every operating room and not traceable, and that she would inject it into muscle. Rachel argued for a divorce, raised the danger to Anna and the neighbours, and found Kim standing over the sleeping Stephen before persuading her downstairs. Rachel left for Baltimore at about two in the morning.

Stephen, meanwhile, was trying to save the marriage. He went to counselling, wrote Kim a letter, cancelled a business trip and arranged a Valentine's weekend at Harbourtown in St Michaels through Mike Miller. Kim spent February 13th at Brad's aunt's house leaving Valentine's gifts and a note, then on February 14th the couple checked into cottage 506 at about three in the afternoon. They attended the dinner theatre production of The Bride Who Cried that evening, where Kim threw herself into the audience participation, and returned to the cottage between ten and half past ten.

At about twenty past one on the morning of February 15th Kim walked into the resort lobby and calmly told the night manager, Elaine Phillips, that her room was on fire. Witnesses described her as neither frantic nor upset. She gave the name Ricco, and staff looked up room 506 and called 911. When asked whether anyone else was in the room she said yes, her husband. Resort employee Philip Parker found Stephen lying on his back on the floor between the two beds, badly burned from the chest up, with his left arm raised. He and Elaine Phillips pulled him onto the porch, but he was already dead. A fire dog signalled an accelerant near where the body had lain, and investigators found the fire had started in two pillows under his head and burned for five to fifteen minutes before running out of oxygen.

Kim told troopers that Stephen had drunk heavily and pressured her for sex, that they argued, and that she drove off toward Easton to see the Millers but got lost for two hours. Nobody at the resort heard her knocking on doors or screaming for help. A Talbot County assistant state's attorney who had been seated at their table said Stephen had one beer, the bar bill for the couple was $5.51, and the autopsy showed a blood alcohol level of 0.00. When confronted with that on February 23rd she said only that she did not understand it. She pressed for the body to be cremated and asked Maureen Miller to find out what her friends had told the police.

The medical evidence described succinylcholine as a fast-acting muscle relaxant, untraceable within minutes, routinely kept in operating rooms. The fire marshal, Deputy Michael Mulligan, ruled out lightning, electrical causes and spontaneous combustion, and could not make the Backwoods cigars found in the room start a fire in repeated tests. The cigars had been bought at the Astor liquor store in Laurel, where Kim was a known customer, and the packet carried the store's marking. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Stephen is buried at Spring Creek Presbyterian Cemetery in State College, Pennsylvania.